No. 468

Gascogne Sauce and with Tomatoes

Sauce Gascogne et aux Tomates

Heat one gill of oil in a saucepan with two cloves of crushed and chopped garlic; add to this one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, the same quantity of chives. two ounces of chopped mushrooms, one ounce of chopped truffles, nutmeg, and mignonette, when all these ingredients are fried without coloring, add half a pint of white wine and one pint of veloute (No. 415). Boil, skim off the surface, reduce and pour in two gills of white wine; thicken with four egg-yolks diluted with half a gill of cream, and just when ready to serve incorporate into the sauce one ounce of anchovy butter (No. 569).

Gascogne and Tomato Sauce.—Add to the above sauce two gills of tomato puree (No. 730), previously strained through a very fine sieve.

← No. 467 French Sauce Hot Sauces No. 469 Genevoise Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A late-nineteenth-century compound velouté, rich with garlic, mushrooms and truffle and finished two ways at once — an egg-yolk liaison and an anchovy butter mount. Most of the work is in the base sauce; the variant is one addition.

The hinge: the liaison must not boilOnce the four yolks slackened with cream go in, the sauce cannot return to a boil or the yolks will curdle into threads. Hold it between about 165 and 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon, then pull it off the heat before working in the anchovy butter.
Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so one gill of oil is 1/2 cup, two gills of wine is 1 cup, and half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. Ranhofer worked in US measure, so his pint of velouté is 2 cups and the half-pint of white wine is 1 cup.
MignonetteIn Ranhofer's usage this is coarsely cracked pepper, generally white, not the shallot-and-vinegar oyster dressing the word now means. A generous pinch of coarsely cracked white pepper is the intent.
Velouté No. 415The base is a white veal or chicken stock thickened with a blond roux and simmered until clean-tasting. A well-made, unsalted chicken velouté works; a thin canned stock thickened at the last minute will not, since the sauce is reduced and any harshness concentrates.
Anchovy butter, No. 569Anchovy fillets pounded smooth and worked into soft butter, then sieved. One ounce is about two tablespoons. Added off the heat, it both seasons and gives the final gloss.
TrufflesAn ounce of chopped black truffle is a serious expense today and would have been far less remarkable in a hotel kitchen of Ranhofer's sort. Leaving it out changes the sauce less than you would fear; a spoonful of truffle-scented oil stirred in at the end is closer to the effect than the jarred summer-truffle peelings sold as a substitute.
SaltAnchovy butter, reduced velouté and reduced wine all carry salt. Season only after the butter has gone in.
Yield and serviceRoughly a quart, enough for eight to twelve servings — it is a coating sauce for poached or roasted white meats, poultry and firm fish rather than something to ladle. The tomato version adds a cup of fine tomato purée for a looser, pinker sauce.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how the book is built: a numbered sauce that depends on three other numbered recipes, so that a working kitchen could assemble it from components already standing on the stove. Sauces named à la gasconne generally point to the southwest of France and its garlic, and the combination of garlic, wine and anchovy here fits that regional shorthand, though Ranhofer gives no source and the version he prints — velouté, truffle, egg-yolk liaison — is thoroughly the grand-hotel manner rather than anything rustic. The tomato variant tacked on at the end is characteristic of the period: tomato purée had become a standard larder item in professional kitchens by the 1890s, and it appears cooks could double a sauce's repertoire by stirring some in.