No. 502
Sauce a la Montebello
Sauce a la Montebello
A compound sauce built from two mother preparations, so the work is really in the béarnaise and the tomato reduction that precede it. The finish with champagne is where it usually goes wrong.
- The measurementsA gill is half a cup. Three gills of tomato sauce is 1½ cups, two gills of champagne is 1 cup; with the pint of béarnaise that makes about 4½ cups of finished sauce, enough for a dozen or so portions alongside grilled beef, veal or fish.
- The hinge: temperatureBéarnaise is a warm egg-yolk emulsion and breaks above roughly 160F. Both the tomato sauce and the champagne must be warm rather than hot when they go in, and the finished sauce should be held no warmer than a bath of about 130-140F. It cannot be reheated on direct flame.
- A cup of champagne is a lot of liquidRanhofer specifies a thick béarnaise and a well reduced tomato sauce for exactly this reason. If either is loose, the wine will thin the sauce past the point of coating. Reduce the tomato sauce until it mounds on a spoon before you combine.
- Warm the wine, do not boil itTake the chill off the champagne before it goes in; boiling it away defeats the purpose, since the wine is the whole point of the name. Add it in a thin stream, whisking.
- Straining"A very fine sieve" means a chinois or a fine tamis, and the sauce is pushed through before the wine goes in, not after. This removes the tarragon stems and shallot from the béarnaise and any tomato fibre, leaving a smooth pale-coral sauce.
- Tomato sauce, 1894 styleNo. 549 is Ranhofer's own cooked tomato sauce, not a canned purée; sauces of this class are generally stock-based and may carry a little roux. Passata reduced with a shallot, a bay leaf and a spoon of good brown stock is the nearest substitute.
- Holding itHold no more than an hour or two in a warm bain-marie, whisked occasionally. Egg-yolk sauces sitting at lukewarm temperatures for a long service are a food-safety problem as well as a texture one; make it close to the meal.
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 Carême-to-Escoffier French system transplanted to Manhattan: a small set of base sauces from which dozens of named derivatives are struck off by adding one or two things. Béarnaise finished with tomato is the sauce generally known as Choron; adding champagne on top of it produces this variant, and the extravagance of the wine is characteristic of a restaurant whose clientele expected to see money in the food. The name is French-military in flavour — Montebello was the title granted to Marshal Jean Lannes, and the northern Italian village gave its name to battles in both 1800 and 1859 — and nineteenth-century kitchens attached such names to dishes freely, so the connection is decorative rather than documented. What the recipe really shows is how the classical repertoire worked: no new technique here at all, only a new proportion and a new label.