No. 421

Brown, Espagnole or Spanish Sauce Stock

Fond pour Sauce Brune Espagnole

Butter the bottom of a thick bottomed saucepan and garnish it with slices of onions, placing on top half a pound of ham, some slices or parings of fat pork, twelve pounds of knuckle of veal, shoulder, and trimmings, six pounds of beef or parings, and moisten with one quart of beef stock (No. 194a); leave the saucepan on the fire until the broth is half reduced, then cover the saucepan and moderate the fire, continue to boil till all the moisture is reduced and falls to a glaze, which is easily perceived as the grease then becomes clear; moisten it once more with eighteen quarts of beef stock; boil, skim off the fat, and add a bunch of parsley, garnished with two bay leaves and as much thyme, basil, celery, and two cloves of garlic, also one pound of carrots cut lengthwise in four, salt, ground pepper, and a little sugar. Cook all together for six hours, skim off the fat and strain through a sieve to keep for further use. This stock is used for moistening brown roux.

← No. 420 Poeler Stock for Cooking Fowl or White Game Stocks, Essences & Auxiliaries No. 422 Veloute Stock →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a restaurant-scale double stock: beef stock used as the moistening liquid for a second extraction of veal and beef, then reduced and strained to become the base of Espagnole. Ranhofer wrote it for Delmonico's, so the quantities need dividing before anything else.

Scale it down by six or eightEighteen quarts of stock plus 18 lb of meat needs a 30-quart pot. Divided by eight you get about 1½ lb veal knuckle and trimmings, 12 oz beef, 1 oz ham, about ½ cup of beef stock for the glaze and about 2¼ quarts to finish, in an 8-quart pot; the six-hour cooking time stays broadly the same.
The glaze is the whole pointThe first quart of stock must reduce all the way down until the fat runs clear and a sticky brown film sets on the pan bottom. That caramelized fond is where the color and depth come from. Stop short of it and you get pale veal broth; let it catch and scorch and the finished stock is bitter.
"Moisten" and "falls to a glaze"Mouiller simply means to add liquid. "Falls to a glaze" (tomber à glace) is the moment the liquid has gone entirely and only rendered fat and a glossy deposit remain.
Beef stock No. 194 aRanhofer's own beef stock, given elsewhere in the book. Any good unsalted beef or veal stock works; commercial low-sodium broth will do, but the finished sauce will be thinner in body since this recipe relies on gelatin from the knuckle rather than added thickener.
Knuckle, shoulder, paringsKnuckle is the lower leg with its joint — sold now as veal shank or osso buco cuts, and the gelatin source that makes the stock set when cold. "Parings" and "trimmings" are butcher's scraps; ask for veal bones and beef trim, or substitute shank meat.
Salt lightlyThis liquid goes on to be reduced further into Espagnole and then into small sauces. Season it barely, or the finished sauce will be over-salted. The "little sugar" is for color and roundness, not sweetness.
Skim, and skim coldSkim during cooking as directed, then chill the strained stock overnight and lift the solid fat cap off. Fat left in will emulsify into the roux and dull the sauce.
Yield and keepingThe reduced eighth-scale batch gives roughly 1½ to 2 quarts after six hours. Refrigerate up to four days, or freeze in pint blocks; a well-made batch will be firm enough to cut with a knife when cold.

A Little History

This is a working page from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a system rather than a menu: numbered stocks feed numbered sauces which feed hundreds of numbered dishes. Espagnole — "Spanish sauce" — is one of the mother sauces codified by Carême earlier in the century, and the name is usually traced to a tradition that a Spanish cook in a French royal kitchen enriched the brown sauce, though the story is anecdotal and the sauce itself is thoroughly French. What the recipe really records is the economics of a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen: eighteen quarts of an already-made beef stock spent on extracting yet more flavor from veal knuckles and butcher's parings, on the assumption that a brigade would be drawing off gallons of finished sauce every service.