No. 431

Barnave Sauce

Sauce a la Barnave

Put four ounces of butter into a saucepan and when hot add a quarter of a pound of red carrots blanched and the same quantity of onions, both cut into three-sixteenth inch pieces. First fry the onions, then add the carrots and fry together a little, add a garnished bunch of parsley with thyme, a clove of garlic, a pound of game carcasses and when a good color add half a bottle of red wine and a pint of broth. Let all cook for three-quarters of an hour, skim it carefully, strain the sauce through a tammy or sieve, dilute it again with another pint of broth and throw in an ounce of very fresh bread raspings, an ounce of butter and the juice of one orange.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A game sauce built on a quick brown stock: aromatics fried in butter, game bones browned with them, then red wine and broth reduced and strained. Ranhofer assumes you have carcasses left from breaking down birds or hare, which is the one thing worth planning for.

The hinge: brown the bones properly"When a good color" is the whole flavor of the sauce. Chop the pound of carcasses small so they fit the pan in one layer and let them take real color before the wine goes in; pale bones give a thin, sour sauce that no amount of reduction will fix.
MeasurementsFour ounces of butter is 1/2 cup (115 g); a quarter pound each of carrot and onion is roughly one large carrot and one medium onion. Half a bottle of red wine is about 12 fl oz (375 ml). Ranhofer's pint is the American 16 fl oz, so you are adding two pints -- four cups -- of broth in total, one pint at each stage.
Three-sixteenth inch piecesA small, even dice, about a standard brunoise. The size matters because the vegetables must cook through in the time the bones take to brown.
Garnished bunch of parsleyA bouquet garni: parsley stems tied with thyme, and here a bay leaf is a fair reading of "garnished." Tie it so you can pull it out before straining.
Game carcassesBacks, necks, ribs and trimmings from venison, hare, pheasant, duck or squab. If you have none, veal bones plus the trimmings from whatever you are serving will give a sauce in the same family, though not the same one.
TammyA tammy was a worsted cloth the sauce was wrung through. A fine chinois, or a fine sieve followed by a pass through damp muslin, does the same job. Skim the fat carefully first, as instructed.
Bread raspingsDried, finely grated crust from a stale loaf, sifted. Plain dry unseasoned breadcrumbs are the modern stand-in. An ounce is about 1/4 cup and thickens the sauce only lightly; whisk it in and give it a minute or two off the boil so it swells.
Butter and orange juice at the endAdd the final ounce of butter and the orange juice with the pan off the heat. Boiling after the juice goes in dulls it and can split the butter.
YieldSomewhere around a pint and a half of finished sauce, depending on how far the first stage reduces; the recipe itself gives no yield or serving count.

A Little History

The sauce comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where the hot-sauce chapter runs to well over a hundred numbered preparations arranged alphabetically for kitchen reference rather than for reading. Its structure is the classic French game sauce: aromatics and bones browned in butter, wetted with red wine, reduced, strained and finished with butter and an acid, the same skeleton that underlies sauce poivrade and sauce salmis. The name is generally taken to honor Antoine Barnave, the orator of the early French Revolution guillotined in 1793, though as with most of the personal names in the nineteenth-century sauce repertoire the attribution is traditional and no record of who first coined it survives.