No. 457

Danish Sauce

Sauce a la Danoise

Put two ounces of butter in a saucepan, with four ounces of thinly sliced ham, and when lightly fried and a fine color, drain off the butter; detach the glaze with a gill of broth, add a clove of garlic, a bay leaf, as much thyme and pint of espagnole (No. 414); cook slowly, despumate, season well, and pass the sauce through either a sieve or a tammy. Cut four ounces of chicken fillets, eight of mushrooms, and four of ham, into three-sixteenth inch squares; put them into the sauce with a small teaspoonful of chopped parsley.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A brown sauce in the classical French manner, thickened by the espagnole it is built on rather than by anything added at the end. The garnish of ham, chicken and mushroom cut small is what makes it Danoise, so cut it neatly.

Start with the espagnoleNo. 414 is Ranhofer's brown sauce, a long-simmered brown roux and stock preparation. Without it there is no recipe. A well-reduced modern demi-glace or a strong reduced brown veal stock lightly thickened will stand in; a packet gravy will not.
GillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. Here it is only enough liquid to dissolve the caramelized ham glaze off the bottom of the pan.
DespumateTo skim. As the sauce simmers, fat and grey albumen rise at the edge; lift them off repeatedly with a ladle. This is the step that separates a clear, glossy sauce from a muddy one; the recipe asks only that it cook slowly, so hold it at a bare tremble, never a boil.
TammyA woollen or linen straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois, or a fine sieve followed by a double layer of rinsed cheesecloth, does the same work.
Drain off the butterThe two ounces of butter are a frying medium only; pour it off before deglazing or the finished sauce will break into grease when it reduces.
The garnish diceThree-sixteenths of an inch is a generous brunoise, about 5 mm. Cut the ham, mushrooms and chicken to the same size so they read as one garnish. The recipe does not say whether the chicken fillets are already cooked; poach or gently saute them before dicing rather than dropping raw chicken into a strained sauce.
HamTwo separate lots: four ounces sliced thin for flavor, discarded with the strainings, and four ounces diced for the garnish. Use a firm dry-cured ham rather than a wet supermarket deli ham, which will weep water and salt.
Seasoning and yieldRanhofer seasons before straining; taste with a light hand, since the ham and the espagnole are both already salty. The garnish comes to a pound in all, and the sauce is built on a pint of espagnole plus a gill of broth.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is essentially Carême's system as it survived into the American gilded age: one long-simmered mother sauce, espagnole, spun off into dozens of named derivatives. Sauce à la Danoise belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century sauces named for countries, courts and diplomats — Danoise, Polonaise, Portugaise, Russe — where the label signals a fixed garnish rather than any real connection to the place; the Danish attribution is best treated as conventional. What makes this one worth attention is its structure: a sauce finished with a fine dice of cooked meat and mushroom is closer to a ragoût or salpicon, and in a restaurant of this scale it existed to be spooned over plain boiled or poached poultry.