No. 403

Root Glaze

Glace de Racines

Put into a saucepan two pounds of carrots cut in big squares, as many onions, one pound of celery roots, and three pounds of turnips; season with a little salt, four cloves, one teaspoonful of whole allspice, and moisten with twelve quarts of water, adding four pounds of split knuckle of veal, and two pounds of the kernel, also a bunch of parsley, garnished with thyme and bay leaf; let cook slowly for four hours, then strain the whole through a fine sieve; return it to the fire, despumate well all the white and fat particles from the surface; let it continue to boil till the consistency of a thick syrup is obtained, then put it away to use when needed.

← No. 402 Meat Glaze, Plain Stocks, Essences & Auxiliaries No. 404 Clear Gravy →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's root glaze is a vegetable-forward cousin of meat glaze: twelve quarts of veal-and-root stock boiled down to a syrup that keeps for weeks and lifts a sauce with a spoonful. The work is almost entirely in the reduction, and the one thing that will ruin it is salt.

Salt almost not at allTwelve quarts reduce to roughly two cups, a concentration of about twenty-four to one. The "little salt" of the original means a pinch, not a teaspoon; season the dish the glaze finishes, never the glaze.
DespumateTo despumate is to skim — pulling off the grey albumin scum and fat that rise as the strained stock returns to the boil. Do it repeatedly in the first half hour and keep the pot at a bare, one-sided simmer so the fat collects at the cool edge rather than emulsifying in.
Celery roots and the kernelCelery roots means celeriac, one pound trimmed. The "kernel" of veal is the noix — the solid muscle of the leg, sold now as top round or cushion; ordinary veal leg or shoulder does the same work. Split knuckle means the joint sawn open so the marrow and gelatin escape.
Vessel and volumeTwelve quarts of water plus some fourteen pounds of meat and root wants a 20-quart stockpot or larger. If your largest pot is 8 quarts, scale the whole recipe down rather than starting with less water — the ratio of solids to liquid is what sets the flavour.
TimingFour hours for the initial cook, as the recipe states, then a long reduction — several hours at least, and longer in a narrow pan. Judge by behaviour, not the clock: it is done when the surface bubbles turn slow and glassy and a spoonful coats the back of the spoon and sheets off in a thick ribbon.
Do not walk away at the endOnce the glaze is down to about a cup it can scorch very quickly. Move it to a smaller saucepan for the last stage, drop the heat, and stir the corners.
Yield and keepingExpect 1½ to 2 cups, which sets to a firm rubbery block when cold. "Put it away" meant a crock in a cold larder; refrigerate it for a month or freeze it in ice-cube trays and use one cube per sauce.
What to use it forA teaspoon dissolved into a pan deglazing, a braise, or a vegetable soup. Because the roots dominate, it suits vegetable and poultry dishes where a plain meat glaze would read too heavy.

A Little History

This is entry No. 403 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The stocks-and-auxiliaries section is the engine room of the book: little in it is a dish in its own right, and much of it is a component that dozens of later recipes call for by number. Glace in this sense simply means a stock boiled to a glossy syrup — the same word as ice or mirror, for the shine it gives. The technique descends from the Carême line of French kitchen practice, where a small stock of concentrated bases let one cook build a sauce in minutes rather than hours. A root glaze specifically hedges against the flatness of a purely meat-based reduction, since carrot and turnip carry sugars that caramelise as the water leaves; commercial demi-glace and glace de viande sold today are made on the same principle, if rarely with three pounds of turnips.