No. 495

Sauce a la Marceau

Keep in a bain-marie, three pints of espagnole (No. 414) reduced with some game fumet (No. 397) and Madeira wine. Cook in plenty of salted water, in a covered vessel, one dozen peeled cloves of garlic, until very tender, then drain them; wipe them dry on a cloth, and fry them for a few minutes in a pan, with some melted butter till the moisture is thoroughly evaporated, then rub them through a sieve and afterward through a tammy (No. 159), and add this puree slowly into the sauce; stir well, and pour it into a sauceboat.

← No. 494 Sauce a la Mantaise Hot Sauces No. 496 Marinade Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A brown sauce finished with a purée of boiled garlic, from a book that assumes a brigade and a larder full of stocks. The garlic technique is the whole point and is worth borrowing even if you never build the espagnole.

Boil the garlic first, and mean itSimmering peeled cloves in plenty of salted water until they collapse strips out the raw pungency and leaves sweetness. Rushing this, or browning the cloves in the pan, gives a harsh, bitter sauce that no amount of Madeira will rescue.
The butter stage is drying, not fryingAfter draining and wiping the cloves, the few minutes in melted butter are meant to drive off water so the purée does not thin the sauce. Keep the heat low enough that nothing takes colour.
Espagnole and game fumetNo. 414 is the book's brown sauce, built on a brown roux and brown stock and long simmered and skimmed; No. 397 is its game fumet, a concentrated game essence. A good reduced veal demi-glace stands in for the first; the fumet has no real substitute beyond reducing your own game or dark poultry stock.
TammyA tammy is a tight woollen or linen cloth through which sauce was wrung by two cooks twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois with a ladle, or a blender followed by a fine sieve, achieves the same smoothness.
Bain-marieHere it means a water bath used for holding, not cooking — the sauce sits over hot water so it stays warm without reducing further or catching.
QuantityThree pints (six cups) of finished sauce is service quantity for a restaurant. For four to six people, work with a cup or so of demi-glace; the recipe's ratio is twelve cloves to six cups, so scale the garlic accordingly.
MadeiraUse a dry Sercial or Verdelho, not a sweet cooking Madeira. Add it to the sauce and reduce before the garlic purée goes in, so the alcohol cooks off and the wine concentrates.
ServingThe game fumet points toward roast or braised game — venison, hare, wild duck — though the recipe itself says nothing about what to serve it with. It also suits beef and lamb.

A Little History

The sauce comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote after some three decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and its name, like those of a number of French sauces, points to a military or political figure — here, most likely General Fran ois S verin Marceau, one of the young commanders of the Revolutionary armies, though Ranhofer, as usual, offers no explanation. The construction is pure nineteenth-century French method: a mother sauce, a game essence, a fortified wine, and a single flavouring worked to velvet smoothness through a cloth. The garlic is the interesting part. Cooked whole in water until sweet and then pur ed, it appears in a period when garlic was still treated warily in fashionable American dining rooms, and this treatment — long boiling to tame it — is the same principle behind the roasted-garlic pur es that came back into favour a century later.