No. 461

Duxelle Sauce with Cooked Fine Herbs and Truffles

Sauce a la Duxelle aux Fines Herbes Cuites et aux Truffes

Set into a saucepan two ounces of grated salt pork, and two ounces of butter, six shallots cut in squares; one clove of crushed and chopped garlic; when all these are fried without coloring add one quarter of a pound of chopped mushrooms, a bay leaf, as much thyme and two cloves. Moisten the whole with half a pint of white wine, and the same quantity of broth, one pint of espagnole (No. 414) or veloute (No. 415), if for white and let cook for fifteen minutes. Add one tablespoonful of chopped truffles and a half a teaspoonful of chopped parsley; take out the bayleaf, thyme and cloves.

← No. 460 Diana Sauce Hot Sauces No. 462 Egg Sauce, English and Polish →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a professional larder where espagnole or velouté is already simmering; the sauce itself is quick once that base exists. A few of his measures and materials need translating.

The hinge: get the mushrooms dryGetting the mushrooms fairly dry -- Ranhofer does not call for it (he moistens the pan as soon as the mushrooms, bay, thyme and cloves go in), but cooking the chopped mushrooms in the pork-and-butter base until much of their liquid has gone will keep the finished sauce from being thinned and its flavour muted.
VolumesA half pint is one cup of wine and one cup of broth; the pint of espagnole or velouté is two cups. The total is about a quart before reduction, yielding roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups after the fifteen minutes.
Grated salt porkMost likely firm fatback salt pork, grated so it renders quickly. Modern salt pork is often wetter and saltier; blanch it a minute if it is very salty, and hold back on salting the finished sauce.
Espagnole and veloutéEspagnole and veloute -- Nos. 414 and 415 are two of the mother sauces of the period, one a brown veal stock thickened with browned roux, one the same idea with white stock. Substituting a plain reduced stock will give you a thin sauce; the roux body is doing real work here.
Shallots "cut in squares"Six shallots is a large amount by modern head sizes. Use about 1/3 cup finely diced, and do not let them take colour, which is what "fried without coloring" is guarding against.
The aromatics come outBay, thyme and the two cloves are steeping, not seasoning to be eaten. Tying them in a scrap of cheesecloth makes the retrieval Ranhofer calls for much easier than fishing for two cloves.
TrufflesA tablespoon of chopped black truffle is a luxury item now as it was then. Preserved truffle peelings or a modest amount of truffle in its own juice are the honest substitutes; truffle oil is a different flavour and tends to overwhelm the mushrooms.
ServingRoughly 2 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight portions. Ranhofer gives no service here; it works as a coating sauce for grilled or roasted meat or veal, and reheats well over low heat.

A Little History

Duxelles is generally traced to the seventeenth-century kitchen of the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose cook was François Pierre de la Varenne, author of Le Cuisinier François — an attribution repeated in nearly every French kitchen manual since, though the documentary link is thinner than the confidence with which it is stated. By the time Charles Ranhofer set down The Epicurean in 1894, after some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, duxelles had settled into its permanent role as the workhorse mushroom preparation of the professional kitchen: a dry, deeply savoury mince that could be folded into stuffings, spread under pastry, or, as here, built out into a sauce. This version is a cross-reference recipe in the truest sense — it presumes the cook already has espagnole or velouté at hand from Nos. 414 and 415, which is exactly how a brigade kitchen of the period worked, with the mother sauces standing ready and the day's variations assembled from them in minutes.