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Truffle Sauce
Cut half a dozen large truffles into quarters, put them in a stewpan with two breakfast cupfuls of Spanish sauce and two-thirds of a wineglassful of sherry, and boil it gently at the side of the fire for forty minutes or so. Pour a little veal stock into the sauce now and then as it becomes reduced. Strain the sauce, chop the truffles coarsely, return them to the stewpan with the sauce and stir them over the fire until boiling again. The sauce is then ready for serving.
A classic brown truffle sauce that assumes you already have espagnole and veal stock on hand — which is what makes it a professional hotel recipe rather than a home one. Everything here hangs on the base sauce.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole: brown roux, veal stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Without it the recipe has no body. A good demi-glace, or a strong reduced veal stock lightly thickened, is the practical substitute.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read "two breakfast cupfuls" as about 2 to 2 1/2 cups of espagnole.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in this period is about 2 fluid ounces, making two-thirds of one roughly 1 1/3 fluid ounces, or about 2 1/2 tablespoons of sherry. Use a dry amontillado or oloroso, not cream sherry.
- "At the side of the fire"On a coal range the side of the hob was the cooler zone. Translate it as the barest simmer over low heat, uncovered so it reduces — the sauce should tremble, not roll. A hard forty-minute boil risks over-reducing and dulling it.
- The veal stock top-upsThe stock is not for flavour so much as to keep the reduction from tightening past the point of coating. Add a splash whenever the sauce thickens noticeably, so the volume stays roughly constant.
- TrufflesSix large truffles is an extravagance no modern domestic kitchen will match. Black winter truffle is most likely what is meant; preserved truffle peelings and their juice will carry the sauce, and truffle oil will not stand up to this much heat.
- Why strain, then returnThe strain separates the quartered truffles from the sauce so they can be chopped, and catches any residue along the way; the truffles go back chopped so they read as texture rather than as garnish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; expect somewhat under the two-odd cups you start with after forty minutes of reduction, enough to sauce several portions of beef, sweetbreads or poultry. Serve it hot from the pan.
Truffle sauce of this kind sits squarely in the classical French repertoire that American luxury hotels imported wholesale in the late nineteenth century — Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, and his 1896 book collects the kind of cooking a large hotel kitchen turned out. The recipe's brevity is the tell: it presumes a sauce cook already has espagnole and veal stock at the stove, which is why it reads as a note to a colleague rather than instructions for a household. Espagnole itself is one of Careme's mother sauces, and by Escoffier's generation a truffled espagnole — sauce Perigueux in its close relative — was a standard finish for the most expensive cuts a menu could offer. European truffle harvests in the 1890s were far larger than today's, which is part of why a call for six large truffles could go unremarked.