No. 437

Bourguignotte Sauce-Lean

Sauce a la Bourguignotte-Maigre

Cut a pound of eels into slices being careful that they are very fresh; put these into a saucepan with two quarts of water, two ounces of minced onions and two ounces of mushroom parings, a bunch of parsley garnished with bay leaf and as much thyme, two minced shallots, pepper and all-spice. Set the saucepan on the fire, let it come to a boil, and continue the boiling for twenty minutes, then strain the liquid and reduce it, adding one pint of lean espagnole sauce (No. 416), and a little lean broth (No. 417); let boil once again, despumate it, pour in a quarter of a bottleful of good white wine; boil and despumate again for half an hour, then add another quarter of a bottle of white wine, making half a bottleful in all; Volnay wine is excellent for this sauce. After it is reduced to a proper consistency, and just when ready to serve, incorporate into it a quarter of a pound of crawfish butter (No. 573).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A fast-day version of a Burgundian red-wine fish sauce, built on an eel stock rather than meat stock. It is a project sauce: the eel essence, the lean espagnole and the crawfish butter are all separate preparations before this one begins.

"Maigre" means lean, not low-fatIn Ranhofer's usage maigre marks a dish containing no meat, for fast days. The espagnole (No. 416) and broth (No. 417) called for here are the fish-and-vegetable versions, not the veal-and-ham ones; using ordinary meat espagnole defeats the whole point of the recipe.
The white wine / Volnay contradictionVolnay is a red wine of the Côte de Beaune, so the instruction to add "good white wine" and then to recommend Volnay does not agree with itself. Burgundian sauces named for the region are usually red-wine sauces, but the recipe says white wine twice, and there is no way to tell from the page whether the wine or the Volnay reference is the slip.
Half a bottleA nineteenth-century bottle is close to the modern 750 ml, so the two additions come to roughly 1 1/2 cups of wine in all, about 3/4 cup at each stage. The recipe adds the first charge, boils and despumates for half an hour, then adds the second and reduces again.
DespumateTo despumate is to skim the scum and fat that rise as a sauce simmers off-centre on the heat. Pull the pan half off the burner so a convection current pushes the impurities to one side and lift them off with a ladle. Doing it faithfully is what gives the sauce its gloss.
EelsA pound of eel gives a gelatinous, slightly sweet stock unlike any other fish. Fresh eel is now a specialist purchase and the European species is critically endangered; other eel species are also at risk, so a firm, gelatinous alternative such as conger, monkfish trimmings or turbot bones is the sounder substitution, giving a workable if less unctuous essence. Cook it thoroughly, as the recipe does, since raw eel serum is an irritant that heat destroys.
Mushroom paringsPeelings, stems and trimmings saved from other preparations, which a restaurant kitchen of this size would have had to hand; at home use 2 oz of chopped mushroom stems, or whole mushrooms if that is what is on hand.
Crawfish butterNo. 573 is shells and trimmings pounded with butter, warmed to draw out the colour, then strained. It is stirred in off the heat at the last moment: boiling it splits the emulsion and dulls the red. A quarter pound is a full stick's worth and is what makes the sauce taste of shellfish rather than of eel.
Yield and useA pint of espagnole plus the reduced essence and wine, finished with butter, will give something over a pint of sauce, though the recipe fixes neither a yield nor a number of servings. It is a sauce for poached or braised fish, for a matelote, or for pike and carp.

A Little History

Sauce à la bourguignotte belongs to the family of red-wine fish sauces associated with Burgundy, where freshwater fish cooked in the local wine — the matelote and the pochouse of the Saône and the Doubs — is old country cooking that the professional kitchen of the nineteenth century refined into a mother-sauce derivative. The maigre designation is the key to why it appears in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York: a fashionable restaurant still had to feed observant Catholic customers through Lent and Fridays, and Ranhofer accordingly gives lean twins for a great many of his sauces, rebuilding them on fish essences instead of meat stock. Eel was the natural base, being cheap, abundant in both European and American waters at the time, and rich enough in gelatin to give a lean sauce the body that veal bones would otherwise supply. The finishing with crawfish butter is a characteristic touch of the period, when compound shellfish butters were used the way a modern kitchen uses a reduction or a flavoured oil — for colour as much as for taste.