No. 466

Flavignan Sauce

Sauce a la Flavignan

Pound half a pound of very fat chicken livers, two ounces of butter, one tablespoonful of chopped parsley and a pinch of finely cut tarragon; have three gills of port wine in a saucepan with one pint of espagnole (No. 414), add to it salt, pepper, coriander seeds, cinnamon and sugar, boil it for a few minutes, and then mix in the pounded livers, stirring them in well; boil again for a few minutes longer and strain through a tammy; finish with two ounces of butter before serving.

← No. 465 Finnoise Sauce Hot Sauces No. 467 French Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A rich liver-thickened brown sauce from Ranhofer's Epicurean, built on the house espagnole. It behaves like a liaison sauce: the pounded liver both thickens and flavors, and it is unforgiving of hard boiling.

Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so three gills of port is 1 1/2 cups, reduced against 2 cups of espagnole. Half a pound of livers and two 2-ounce additions of butter (4 ounces total) round out the measures.
Espagnole No. 414Ranhofer's espagnole is a long-simmered brown roux-thickened stock sauce; consult No. 414 for his exact formula. A good reduced brown veal stock lightly thickened is the nearest practical stand-in; jarred demi-glace concentrate diluted to 2 cups also works.
Undefined spicingSalt, pepper, coriander, cinnamon and sugar are given without amounts. Treat them as a whisper: a few crushed coriander seeds, a small pinch of cinnamon, a teaspoon of sugar to offset the port. The sauce should not read as spiced.
Pound means pureeThe mortar work exists to break the livers to a smooth paste so they disperse rather than curdle into grains. A food processor with the butter, parsley and tarragon does the same job in seconds.
The hinge: gentle heat after the liver goes inHeat after the liver goes in -- The recipe says to boil the sauce again for a few minutes once the liver paste is stirred in, then strain. Modern practice favours keeping it at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil, since vigorous boiling tends to set the liver proteins into granules; the straining through a tammy that follows is in any case there to catch them.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a sieve followed by a doubled cheesecloth, gives the same result.
Final butter off the heatFinal butter -- The recipe finishes with a further 2 ounces of butter before serving, in the manner of a monter au beurre. Whisking it in off the heat, in pieces, is the usual way to keep the emulsion stable; hard reheating afterwards risks splitting it.
Yield and useRoughly 3 cups after straining. A sauce of this type -- port, liver, sweet spice -- would conventionally be served with roast or braised game birds and dark meats rather than with fish, though the book does not specify its use here.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what came out of Delmonico's kitchen in New York, and its hot-sauce chapter is an inventory of the classical French repertoire as an American luxury restaurant used it: dozens of derivatives spun off two or three mother sauces, each with a proper name and a number. The name Flavignan is not explained in the book, and its origin is unclear; French sauce names of this type were commonly drawn from places, patrons or noble houses, and the Burgundian town of Flavigny is sometimes suggested, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. What is certain is the technique: thickening a brown sauce with pounded liver is an old method that predates roux-based cooking, closely related to the liver-bound sauces of medieval and early modern French kitchens and still visible in salmis and in sauces made from the trimmings of game birds. The port, cinnamon and coriander point the same direction, toward the sweet-spiced game sauces that nineteenth-century chefs inherited and pared back.