No. 483

Indian Sauce

Sauce a l'Indienne

Put two ounces of butter into a saucepan with two ounces of onions, two ounces of lean unsmoked ham, one ounce of celery and a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and two cloves of garlic. Moisten with two gills of veal blond (No. 423), one quart of espagnole (No. 414) or veloute (No. 415) (if veloute is used thicken with four egg-yolks and half a gill of cream), add one tablespoonful of pepper corns, three cloves, one pinch of saffron, and one teaspoonful of curry. Reduce all this and then strain it through a tammy (Fig. 88), and just when ready to serve incorporate into it two ounces of fresh butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French mother-sauce derivative: a curry-scented aromatic base built on espagnole or velouté, strained and finished with butter. Nothing here is difficult, but it assumes you already have a stock and a thickened sauce on hand.

The hinge: the yolk liaisonIf you take the velouté route, the four yolks and cream are a liaison; keep the sauce below a boil once they are in, since boiling will curdle them and no amount of straining will bring it back.
Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of veal blond is one cup and half a gill of cream is a quarter cup. Starting from a quart of espagnole or velouté plus the stock, the sauce finishes somewhat under that volume once reduced.
Veal blondRanhofer's No. 423 is a light veal stock, pale rather than dark. Any good unsalted veal or light chicken stock stands in.
Espagnole and veloutéEspagnole is the brown mother sauce — brown roux, brown stock, tomato, long reduction. Velouté is the pale one, white roux and white stock. The recipe treats them as interchangeable here, but they give quite different sauces: the espagnole version is deeper and needs no liaison, the velouté version is delicate and does.
Unsmoked lean hamThis means a plain cured ham, not bacon and not anything smoked. A piece of prosciutto cotto or a good boiled ham works; smoked ham will dominate the curry and saffron.
The curryOne teaspoon of nineteenth-century curry powder in a quart of sauce is a whisper by current standards, and it was meant to be — this is a French sauce with an Indian accent, not a curry. Modern blends vary enormously in strength; taste as it reduces and adjust rather than trusting the measure.
A tammyA tammy is a woven cloth strainer, worked by twisting the sauce through it between two people in a professional kitchen. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a conical strainer lined with damp muslin, does the same job.
Mounting with butterThe final two ounces of butter goes in cold, in pieces, with the pan off the heat, swirled until it emulsifies. Add it any earlier and it will break as the sauce sits.
Whole spicesThe tablespoon of peppercorns and three cloves are infusion aromatics, not seasoning to be eaten — they are meant to come out at the strain. Do not substitute ground pepper for them.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter owes much to the system generally traced to Carême and Gouffé, transplanted to Manhattan. Sauce à l'indienne belongs to a nineteenth-century French fashion for what are often described as sauces in the foreign manner — Indian, Portuguese, Polish, Russian — in which a familiar mother sauce was flavoured to suggest a distant cuisine rather than to reproduce one. Curry powder had reached French professional kitchens through British trade, and here it appears in the same register as the saffron and cloves: an aromatic accent measured by the teaspoon, strained out along with the ham and the parsley bunch. The result says more about how a Gilded Age dining room imagined India than about India, but as a piece of technique it is exact, and the velouté-plus-yolks-and-cream variant Ranhofer gives is the sauce the classical repertoire had already codified, well before 1894, as sauce allemande.