No. 490

Sauce a la Lucullus

Garnish the bottom of a thick bottomed buttered saucepan with four onions cut in slices, four ounces of sliced ham, one pound of sliced veal and half a pound of game fragments, moisten with one pint of veal blond (No. 423). Set this on a slow fire and let reduce to a glaze, then remoisten with two and a half quarts more broth, adding a bunch of parsley, as much celery, and two bay leaves, with an equal quantity of thyme, four cloves, two ounces of truffle parings and four ounces of mushrooms, let it boil until perfectly cooked, then strain through a tammy and reduce it to the consistency of a thick syrup, and add one quart of veloute (No. 415) or espagnole (No. 414); for either one or the other have two spoonfuls of meat glaze (No. 401), then put in four ounces of truffles cut in balls and four ounces of channeled mushrooms; mix well with the sauce and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic compound sauce built on the old brigade system: it assumes you already have veal stock, velouté or espagnole, and meat glaze on hand, and cross-references them by number. What follows is what those shorthand terms mean and where the sauce can go wrong.

The hinge: the first reductionThe pint of stock over the aromatics must reduce to a sticky glaze on the pan bottom without burning. Take it just to the point where the sugars caramelize and film the pan, then deglaze with the remaining broth; a few seconds too far and the whole sauce carries a scorched bitterness that no amount of straining removes.
Veal blondA light veal stock made from unroasted bones and meat, pale gold rather than brown. A good unsalted white veal or chicken stock substitutes; avoid anything already reduced or salted, since the liquid here is reduced very heavily -- three quarts down to a syrup.
Velouté and espagnoleVelouté is white stock thickened with a blond roux; espagnole is brown stock thickened with brown roux, traditionally with tomato and mirepoix. Either gives a different sauce here, one pale and delicate, one dark and assertive. Modern practice more often uses a reduced, lightly bound brown stock in place of espagnole.
Meat glazeGlace de viande: stock reduced until it sets to a rubbery, intensely savoury block. Two spoonfuls is a rounded tablespoon or so each. Commercial demi-glace concentrate is the nearest shop-bought equivalent, but it is salted, so hold back on seasoning until the end.
Game fragmentsTrimmings and scraps from game birds or venison, the sort a large kitchen had daily. Duck or pheasant carcass and trim works; without any game the sauce is still good but loses the slightly musky depth the name implies.
Truffle parings and channeled mushroomsParings are the black peelings left from turning truffles, sold jarred and much cheaper than whole truffles. "Channeled" mushrooms are caps fluted with a paring knife in a spiral, purely decorative; plain caps taste the same. Add both garnishes at the very end so they stay distinct.
TammyA tammy is a fine woollen or linen cloth through which the sauce was forced, often by two cooks twisting it. A chinois lined with muslin, pressed with a ladle, does the same job.
Scale and yieldAs written this begins with about three quarts of liquid plus a quart of finished sauce and reduces hard; expect somewhere near a quart and a half of finished sauce, enough for a very large service. Halving or quartering everything is sensible for a home kitchen, and the reduction times shorten accordingly.
TimingNo times are given. Reckon on 30-45 minutes for the first reduction to a glaze, an hour and a half or more of gentle simmering after remoistening, then as long again to bring the strained liquid to a syrup. This is an afternoon's work, not a weeknight sauce.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put this in The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and it is a good specimen of how that book works: nearly every recipe leans on numbered preparations elsewhere in the volume, so a single sauce quietly requires a stocked professional larder behind it. The name honours Lucius Licinius Lucullus, the Roman general whose banquets became a byword for luxury, and by the nineteenth century "a la Lucullus" was often used loosely in restaurant French for anything trimmed with truffles and expensive garnish rather than a fixed formula. The structure here is pure Careme-descended grande cuisine: a fond of meat and aromatics reduced to a glaze, rebuilt with stock, cooked out, strained, reduced again, and only then married to a mother sauce and finished with garnish. Escoffier, working in the same tradition a few years later, would simplify and codify this inheritance, moving in time away from espagnole toward jus lie, though the layered fonds never disappeared from his own book.