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Recipes (SAUCES As the three chief)
SAUCES As the three chief foundation sauces in cookery, Espagnole or brown sauce, Veluté or white sauce, and Béchamel, are alluded to so often in these pages, it will be well to give simple Italian recipes for them.
Australian wines may be used in all recipes where wine is mentioned: Harvest Burgundy for red, and Chasselas for Chablis.
No. I. Espagnole or Brown Sauce The chief ingredient of this useful sauce is good stock, to which add any remnants and bones of fowl or game. Butter the bottom of a stewpan with at least two ounces of butter, and in it put slices of lean veal, ham, bacon, cuttings of beef, fowl, or game trimmings, three peppercorns, mushroom trimmings, a tomato, a carrot, and a turnip cut up, an onion stuck with two cloves, a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, parsley, and marjoram. Put the lid on the stewpan and braize well for fifteen minutes, then stir in a tablespoonful of flour, and pour in a quarter pint of good boiling stock and boil very gently for fifteen minutes, then strain through a tamis, skim off all the grease, pour the sauce into an earthenware vessel, and let it get cold. If it is not rich enough, add a little Liebig or glaze. Pass through a sieve again before using.
A compressed version of the classic brown mother sauce, written for cooks who already knew the method. The quantities as printed are thin on detail, so read the whole thing before lighting the burner.
- The liquid is under-specifiedA quarter pint (5 fl oz British measure, about 2/3 cup) of stock is a small amount given the pan of trimmings and vegetables it has to cover. The opening line says the chief ingredient is good stock; treat the quarter pint as the first addition and go on adding hot stock, a ladle at a time, until you have the consistency and quantity you want.
- "Braize" here means sweatFifteen minutes with the lid on over moderate heat, not a long wet braise. The point is to draw the juices out of the meat and vegetables and let them catch lightly on the pan bottom, which is where the colour comes from. If nothing browns, the sauce will be pale and weak.
- Cook the flourFifteen minutes of gentle simmering is the minimum for the flour to lose its raw taste; a traditional espagnole is held at a bare simmer for an hour or more, skimmed repeatedly. The longer, slower version is markedly better and no more work.
- TamisA tamis is a drum-shaped sieve of fine cloth or wire. A fine-mesh conical strainer does the job, and a second pass through a sieve lined with muslin gives the same clarity as the original's final straining.
- Liebig and glazeLiebig's Extract of Meat was a commercial concentrated beef paste. Use a good beef bouillon paste or, better, a spoonful of homemade glace de viande — reduced stock — for the same effect without the salt spike.
- Cooling and keepingThe instruction to pour it into an earthenware vessel and let it get cold is a pre-refrigeration keeping method: cold sauce sets and is easier to handle. Note that the recipe has you skim off all the grease first, so there is no fat cap left to seal it. Cool it quickly and refrigerate, where it keeps three or four days; it freezes well in small portions.
- Onion cloutéAn onion stuck with two cloves is the classic clouté. Halve it and cut the halves so they sit flat in the butter and take colour, then fish out the cloves at the straining stage.
- The wine noteThe book offers Australian wines wherever wine is called for: Harvest Burgundy for red, Chasselas in place of Chablis. Any dry, unoaked white and a light dry red will serve.
- YieldAs printed the recipe makes a very small quantity — under a cup. Scale it up with more stock if you want a usable amount; the headnote says these three foundation sauces are alluded to constantly elsewhere in the book.
The three "foundation sauces" named here — espagnole, velouté and béchamel — come from the classification codified in early nineteenth-century French practice, generally traced to Carême, who organised the sauce repertoire into a handful of bases from which everything else was derived. The Cook's Decameron, an Italian-leaning English book of 1901 framed as ten days of conversation and cookery, pauses to give these three because its Italian recipes assume them constantly; even a book arguing for Italian lightness could not escape the French grammar of the professional kitchen. The Australian wine note is the more revealing detail: by 1900 colonial wines were cheap and widely stocked in London, and a household writer could reasonably tell readers to reach for Harvest Burgundy instead of the French bottle the recipe presumed.