No. 425

Allemande with Red Wine and Fruits

Allemande au Vin Rouge et aux Fruits

Cook six ounces of dry black cherries or prunes, cut in four, in two gills of red wine and as much water, add a bit of cinnamon stick, three cloves, and the peel from one lemon; let simmer for twenty minutes on a slow fire, then drain and add to the juice the same quantity of espagnole (No. 414) as there is sauce; reduce, skim, and after the liquid is well reduced, take out the lemon peel, cinnamon, and cloves, then put the cherries back into the sauce and serve. Cherries and prunes may both be used together, half of each.

← No. 424 African Sauce Hot Sauces No. 426 American Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A game sauce built on espagnole, thinned and perfumed with spiced red wine and dried fruit. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions depend on two conversions and on having a decent brown sauce ready.

GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of red wine and as much water means 1 cup each. Six ounces of dried fruit is by weight, roughly a cup or so of dried cherries, or prunes weighed to the same six ounces and quartered.
EspagnoleNo. 414 is the book's own brown sauce, the base of this family; a good commercial demi-glace, or reduced brown veal stock lightly bound, stands in. The instruction is to add an equal volume of espagnole to the strained fruit liquid, so measure the liquid after straining.
Slow fireA bare simmer with the surface barely trembling. Twenty minutes at a rolling boil will drive off the wine and leave the cinnamon and cloves harsh.
SkimmingThe skimming step is not optional in classical brown-sauce work. As the sauce reduces, fat and albumen rise at the cooler edge of the pan; setting the pot slightly off-centre on the burner drives the scum to one side where it can be lifted off, which keeps the finished sauce clean.
The aromatics come outCinnamon, cloves and lemon peel are infusion only. Left in through the reduction they turn medicinal, and the clove in particular will dominate. Pull them before the fruit goes back.
Reduction pointReduce until the sauce coats a spoon and leaves a clean line when you draw a finger through it.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no yield or serving number. It reads as a sauce for dark, strong-flavoured meats such as venison, hare, wild boar, duck or a braised ham rather than for delicate ones.

A Little History

Despite the name, the "allemande" here has nothing to do with the pale egg-and-lemon allemande of the white sauce family; the label in nineteenth-century French kitchens is often said to have been attached loosely to preparations thought to be in the German manner, and sweet-sour fruit sauces with wine, dried cherries and warm spice were the kind of thing French cooks associated with German and Central European game cookery. Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, set out his sauces in an alphabetical list, the neighbouring entries being African Sauce and American Sauce, and this one is simply espagnole carrying a spiced wine infusion. Dried black cherries and prunes belonged to that winter tradition, kept dry through the year and reconstituted in wine, and the combination of sour cherry with clove and cinnamon against a dark meat stock is a familiar one in game sauces from Alsace eastward.