No. 472

Gourmets Sauce

Sauce des Gourmets

Cut four tomatoes in two across, press out the seed and put them in a saucepan with parsley, thyme, bay leaf, salt, mignonette, and one small minced onion; boil for twenty minutes, drain and strain through a sieve; keep the liquid; then put a pint of the pulp into a saucepan with two gills of meat glaze (No. 401), beat them well together with a wire whisk, and stir in a quarter of a pound of lobster butter, adding a tablespoonful of wine vinegar, one pinch of minced tarragon and a tablespoonful of finely chopped and blanched shallots slightly fried in butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A rich compound-butter sauce in the classic French manner: tomato pulp let down with meat glaze and mounted with lobster butter. It is built for poached or grilled fish, and everything depends on how the butter goes in.

The hinge: mount the butter off the heatOnce the lobster butter goes in, the sauce must never boil or even properly simmer. Whisk the cold butter in in pieces with the pan off the flame; boiling will break the emulsion and dull the coral-red color that is the whole point of the sauce.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of meat glaze is one cup. A quarter pound of lobster butter is 4 oz, one stick's worth.
Meat glaze (No. 401)Ranhofer's cross-reference is to a brown-stock glaze of the glace de viande type: stock reduced until it coats a spoon and sets firm when cold. A good reduced veal stock or a quality demi-glace stands in; use less if yours is salty, as the sauce is otherwise seasoned only lightly.
Lobster butterMade by pounding cooked lobster shells, coral and any roe with butter, warming gently, then straining and chilling; proportions vary from source to source. It is not sold in supermarkets; make it from the debris of a lobster or crayfish, or the sauce loses its identity.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked peppercorns, white pepper in nineteenth-century French kitchens. Roughly crushed black pepper is close enough; it is strained out with the herbs.
The tomato quantity does not add upFour tomatoes, seeded and cooked down, will not yield a pint of pulp — expect a cup at best from large ones. Plan on eight to ten good tomatoes. The recipe says to keep the strained cooking liquid but never says what for; thinning the finished sauce is the obvious guess, not a stated instruction.
Blanching the shallotsBlanching before the light frying pulls out the raw sulfurous bite so the shallot reads as sweetness against the vinegar. Thirty seconds in boiling water, drained well, then a brief turn in butter — do not let them color.
Yield and serviceAbout three cups, enough for eight to ten portions. It belongs with poached turbot, sole, salmon or lobster, sauced at the table rather than held hot for long.

A Little History

The recipe comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after two spells as chef of Delmonico's in New York, roughly 1862-1876 and 1879-1896. Sauces of this type — a tomato base fortified with meat glaze and finished with a shellfish butter — belong to the grand repertoire Ranhofer learned in France and carried into American hotel kitchens, where a single shelf of compound butters (lobster, crayfish, anchovy, ravigote) could turn one mother sauce into a dozen named ones. The name is simply a flourish: "sauce of the gourmets." Its cross-references, to meat glaze at No. 401 and to neighbors like Gooseberry Sauce and Green Sauce, show how the book was meant to be used — not as a set of standalone recipes but as a system, where a cook who had already made the day's glaze and butters could assemble this in minutes.