No. 500

Sauce a la Mirabeau

Pound three hard boiled egg-yolks with a handful of chervil and two tablespoonfuls of capers, adding a quarter of a pound of butter, a clove of garlic chopped and crushed; then rub the mixture through a sieve. Put into a saucepan a quart of veloute (No. 415) and two gills of chicken stock (No. 195); let it boil up; despumate the surface and reduce the whole, afterward adding very slowly the prepared butter, working it in the sauce with a whisk, season highly and strain through a tammy, heating it again before using.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compound-butter finish mounted into a velouté. The whole dish stands or falls on how the butter goes in at the end.

Mount the butter off the boilReduce the sauce first, then pull it back below a simmer before whisking in the egg-yolk butter a small piece at a time. If the sauce is boiling the butter is more likely to break.
Gills and quartsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of chicken stock is one cup. The quart of velouté is a US quart, four cups; the finished yield depends on how far the reduction is taken.
Velouté No. 415Ranhofer's velouté is a white roux moistened with white stock and simmered; a modern chicken velouté — butter and flour cooked blond, whisked with a quart of good chicken stock and simmered with skimming — is a reasonable stand-in.
DespumateSimply to skim: bring the sauce to one side of the heat so the scum and fat drift to the cooler edge, and lift them off with a ladle. Worth repeating during the reduction, or the finished sauce may taste of stale fat.
TammyA tammy is a worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a small ladle, or a doubled layer of muslin, gives the same result.
ChervilA handful means the leaves, stems discarded. Chervil is fragile and faintly aniseed; flat parsley with a few tarragon leaves is a common substitute, though it is not the same sauce.
Butter quantityA quarter pound is 4 oz / 115 g, worked with three yolks, the capers and the herbs. Sieving the paste is not optional — unsieved caper skins and egg granules will not disperse in the sauce.
Season highlyCapers bring their own salt, so season after the butter is in, not before. Reheat gently over a water bath; a direct flame at this point will split it.

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 is essentially the French repertoire of the Second Empire transplanted to Manhattan. Garnishes and sauces à la Mirabeau are generally traced to the Comte de Mirabeau, the orator of the early French Revolution, whose name attached in the nineteenth century to a family of preparations built on compound butters — most often anchovy and tarragon, with olives and anchovy fillets laid in a lattice over grilled meat. Ranhofer's version drops the anchovy for capers, chervil and a clove of garlic. The method — a mother sauce reduced, then finished with a sieved flavoured butter — is the standard grammar of the era: the velouté carries body, the butter carries taste, and nothing is thickened twice.