Pour into a saucepan six gills of espagnole sauce (No. 414) and two gills of veal blond (No. 423), reduce it to a third, then add a tablespoonful of powdered sweet Spanish peppers, a very finely shreded green pepper, and a quarter of a pound of raw lean ham cut into small three-sixteenth inch squares, boil all slowly, despumate the sauce, and just when ready to serve squeeze in the juice of a lemon.
A compound brown sauce built on two of Ranhofer's mother sauces, so most of the work happens before this recipe begins. Read it as a finishing procedure rather than a dish.
Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, where he was chef for more than thirty years, and its 3,500-odd numbered entries are cross-referenced like an engineering manual — this sauce is meaningless without Nos. 414 and 423 behind it. The name points to Castile, and the Spanish signature is explicit: paprika, fresh green pepper and cured ham. Nineteenth-century French cookery routinely labelled derivative sauces by nationality or place in this way — espagnole itself, portugaise, italienne, hongroise — and the geography usually indicates a single defining ingredient rather than any real dish from the region. Paprika is often said to have entered professional French kitchens as a fashionable seasoning during the nineteenth century, and its appearance in a Delmonico's sauce suggests how readily a New York luxury restaurant absorbed the vocabulary of continental haute cuisine.