No. 498

Matelotte Sauce

Sauce Matelotte

Cut in slices one pound of pike, half a pound of eels, and half a pound of carp; put these into a saucepan with minced carrots and onions, two ounces of each, half a handful of parsley and basil, two small cloves of garlic, bay leaf, thyme, salt and allspice; pour in half a bottleful of Bordeaux wine, and half a pint of fish broth or water; let boil for ten minutes, then drain and add to the liquid either half a pint of espagnole sauce (No 414), or some kneaded butter; reduce, dilute with a gill of Bordeaux wine, and finally incorporate into it, two ounces of fresh butter. Just when ready to serve throw into the sauce, half a pound of mushrooms, and twenty-four small white onions lightly browned in a pan and cooked in broth.

A More Simple Way, is to fry a little minced onions and shallot in butter, and when a nice color drain off the butter and moisten the onions with two gills of Burgundy wine; let the liquid reduce to half and then incorporate four gills of espagnole sauce (No. 414); let reduce once more, and after the sauce is properly done, strain it through a sieve, and keep it warm.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer gives two versions: a full matelote sauce built on a freshwater fish infusion, and a shortcut of onion, wine and espagnole. Both hinge on reduction rather than thickener, so plan on time at the stove.

The fish is seasoning, not an ingredientThe two pounds of pike, eel and carp are simmered ten minutes and then drained — only the liquid goes forward. The pieces are not returned to the sauce; the recipe does not say what becomes of them.
MeasuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup and four gills is two cups. "Half a bottleful" of Bordeaux works out to roughly 12 fl oz, call it 1 1/2 cups. Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
EspagnoleNo. 414 is a brown sauce built on stock, thickened with brown roux and long reduction — a lengthy job in itself. A well-reduced homemade brown stock, lightly thickened, is the honest substitute; commercial demi-glace concentrate will do at the cost of salt control.
Kneaded butterThe alternative to espagnole is beurre manié: equal weights soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked in bit by bit off a hard boil. Roughly 1 oz of each will body up this quantity of liquid.
Finish off the heatThe final two ounces of fresh butter is a monté au beurre: pull the pan from the flame and whisk the butter in in pieces. Hard boiling afterwards risks the butter separating out.
Onions and mushroomsTwenty-four pearl onions browned and then simmered in broth until tender, and the mushrooms, are garnish added at the last moment so they keep their shape. Small button mushrooms sautéed separately, or quartered creminis, both work; do not stew them in the sauce.
AllspiceThe recipe does not say whether the allspice is whole or ground; whole berries, a couple of them, suit an aromatic poaching liquid. Ground allspice at any volume will dominate the wine.
YieldThe full version reduces to something on the order of 2 to 3 cups. The simple version, starting from two cups of espagnole, lands near the same place.

A Little History

A matelote is a French freshwater fish stew braised in red wine — the name is generally traced to matelot, sailor — and the dish is associated with the Loire and the rivers of Burgundy and Alsace, where eel, carp and pike were what the net brought up. Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's in New York, files this sauce among the hot sauces in The Epicurean (1894) rather than among the fish dishes; in a kitchen of that scale it would have been a component held warm and spooned over anything from poached fish to poached eggs à la matelote. The two versions on the page show the period's working economy plainly — the long one spends two pounds of fish on a couple of pints of liquid, the short one gets a serviceable red-wine sauce out of onion, shallot and the espagnole already standing on the stove.