No. 458

D'Antin Sauce

Sauce a la d'Antin

Put into a saucepan two ounces of butter, add two ounces of onions cut in one-eight inch squares, and fry them without letting them attain color; moisten with one pint of espagnole (No. 414), one gill of Madeira, and one gill of tomato puree (No. 730); add half an ounce of chopped truffles, two ounces of mushrooms cut in eighth of an inch squares, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, and a small pinch of tarragon leaves; and also one coffeespoonful of chopped chives.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compound brown sauce from Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), built on espagnole in the classical manner. The work is done before you start: everything here depends on the quality of the base sauce.

A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So a quarter cup Madeira and a quarter cup tomato puree against a pint of espagnole.
EspagnoleRanhofer's No. 414 is the classical brown sauce: a brown roux moistened with brown stock and mirepoix, simmered and skimmed for hours. A good reduced veal stock thickened lightly will stand in; a jarred demi-glace concentrate diluted to sauce consistency is the practical substitute.
CoffeespoonfulUsually taken as smaller than a teaspoon, often reckoned at about half a teaspoon, though spoon measures were not standardised and a French-trained cook may have meant something nearer a full teaspoon. Half a teaspoon of chives is a safe reading.
Tomato puree No. 730Ranhofer's puree is a cooked and sieved tomato preparation, likely closer in body and acidity to a light passata than to the thick concentrated paste sold in tubes. If using paste, thin it and use considerably less.
The onionsFried in butter without color is the hinge. Any browning at this stage muddies the sauce and pushes it toward a plain brown gravy rather than the clean, sharply garnished sauce intended.
Reduction and the wineThe recipe gives no simmering time. Let the Madeira and puree reduce with the espagnole for ten to fifteen minutes to cook off the raw alcohol, then add the truffle, mushrooms and herbs near the end so the dice stay distinct and the tarragon and chives keep their perfume.
The diceEighth-inch squares throughout — onion and mushroom both. The garnish is meant to be visible and uniform; this is a sauce you can see through to, not a smooth one.
YieldAbout a pint and a half, enough for eight to ten portions of grilled or roasted beef, veal or game.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for most of the last third of the nineteenth century, and The Epicurean is his attempt to set the whole French repertoire he worked from into one enormous numbered system — sauces cross-referenced to other sauces, each dish assuming you have the preceding thousand at hand. Sauces named for aristocrats and diplomats fill the hot-sauce chapter, and the d'Antin family, whose name is attached to a Paris street laid out on their former estate, belongs to that habit of naming rather than to any documented dish invention. What distinguishes this one within the espagnole family is its combination of Madeira, tomato and a truffle-mushroom garnish cut small: it sits between a sauce Madère and a chasseur, and its structure — fortified wine, tomato, fine dice of fungus and green herbs — is the standard grammar from which dozens of the book's other entries are built by substitution.