No. 429

Argentine Sauce

Sauce Argentine

Put into a sautoir, four tablespoonfuls of oil; set it on the fire and when hot, add two ounces of chopped onions, and a finely shreded green pepper, a crushed and chopped clove of garlic, a bunch of parsley garnished with a bay leaf, and as much thyme; fry the whole without attaining color; then drain off the oil and moisten with one gill of white wine, and two gills of tomato puree (No. 730); season, and add a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414), and three tablespoonfuls of meat glaze; boil the whole, skim carefully, and reduce to a proper consistency; pass through a tammy and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic compound brown sauce from Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), built on espagnole and thickened only by reduction. The work is in the base sauces it references, not in the sauce itself.

Espagnole is the whole jobNo. 414 is a brown sauce built on stock and a brown roux, long-simmered; see Ranhofer's own entry for what goes into it. Without it this recipe is a pan of vegetables in wine. A good commercial demi-glace, thinned slightly, is the practical substitute; a pint is 2 cups.
Meat glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Three tablespoons is a lot of concentrated salt and gelatin, so go carefully with seasoning. Sold in jars and tubs; commercial versions vary a great deal in salinity, so taste as you go.
GillHalf a cup. So 1/2 cup white wine and 1 cup tomato purée.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. Any wide saucepan works; the width matters because the sauce is finished by reduction.
Draining off the oilThe oil is a cooking medium only, not part of the finished sauce. Tip it off before the wine goes in, or the finished sauce will be greasy.
Fry without colorThe onion, pepper and garlic are sweated, not browned. All the brown flavor is meant to come from the espagnole and glaze; scorched garlic here reads as bitterness in a sauce that gets concentrated further.
The bunch of parsley with bay and thymeA bouquet garni. Tie it so it can be pulled before straining, and remember it will keep infusing during the reduction.
Pass through a tammyA tammy is a fine woven cloth; the sauce is forced through it with a wooden pestle or spoon. A fine chinois pressed hard, or a conical strainer lined with muslin, does the same thing.
YieldSomething over 3 1/2 cups goes in; what comes out depends entirely on how far you reduce it, since the recipe says only "a proper consistency." A sauce for grilled or roasted beef, veal or game.

A Little History

Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York over two separate stints, and The Epicurean is essentially the house's working repertory set down in print, with its roughly hundred and fifty numbered sauces cross-referenced like an index. "Argentine" here almost certainly has nothing to do with Argentina and everything to do with the nineteenth-century French habit of naming sauces after countries, cities, opera characters and patrons; a great many of Ranhofer's names are decorative rather than descriptive. What is on the plate is a Spanish- or Provençal-leaning garnish — oil rather than butter, green pepper, garlic, tomato — folded into the standard grand-cuisine brown sauce, which was how the classical kitchen absorbed regional flavor without departing from its own architecture. The structure, sweated aromatics moistened with wine and tomato, bound with espagnole, fortified with glaze and passed through cloth, is the same one Carême had codified two generations earlier.