No. 503

Sauce a la Montigny and Tomato Extract

Sauce a la Montigny et a l'Extrait de Tomates

Put into a saucepan two ounces of fresh butter and two teaspoonfuls of chopped shallots; let fry colorless with a bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf; cook together for five minutes, then moisten with two gills of tomato extract, a gill of meat glaze (No. 401), three gills of espagnole sauce (No. 414), a pinch of powdered sugar, a pint of veloute (No. 415), chopped parsley and lemon juice.

Tomato Extract.—Cook some tomatoes for half an hour; strain them through a coarse sieve, put them on a piece of muslin over a vessel to retain all the falling liquid, and reduce this liquid to a thick syrup.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compound sauce in the classic Delmonico manner: two mother sauces, a glaze and a tomato reduction, all built on a shallot-and-herb base. Nothing here is difficult, but the cross-references mean you are effectively making four things.

Gills and pintsA gill is a half cup (4 fl oz). So two gills of tomato extract is 1 cup, one gill of meat glaze is 1/2 cup, three gills of espagnole is 1 1/2 cups, and the pint of veloute is 2 cups. Finished volume is roughly 5 cups before reduction.
Meat glaze is potentNo. 401 glace de viande is brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets like rubber when cold. Half a cup of the real thing will overwhelm the sauce and salt it heavily. Start with a couple of tablespoons, taste, and add more; if you are using a commercial demi-glace concentrate rather than true glaze, cut the quantity further still.
Tomato extract is not tomato pasteRanhofer's extract is fresh tomatoes cooked, sieved, drained through muslin and the resulting liquid reduced to syrup: intensely tomato-flavoured but with none of the pulp and none of the caramelised, tinny note of canned paste. Passata reduced by two thirds is the nearest quick substitute; canned paste thinned with water is not the same thing.
The muslin stepSieving then draining through cloth separates pulp from liquid, and it is only the liquid that gets reduced. Do not press or wring the cloth or you push pulp through and the extract turns cloudy and pasty. Expect a very small yield: reducing the drained liquid alone to a thick syrup leaves only a fraction of what you started with.
Colourless fryingSweat the shallots in the butter over low heat so they stay pale. Any browning here fights the smooth pale-brown of the finished sauce and adds a scorched edge that the veloute will not absorb.
The bouquet"A bunch of parsley garnished with thyme and bay leaf" is a bouquet garni, tied so it can be lifted out. The recipe never says to remove it, but it is not meant to stay in the finished sauce.
Parsley and lemon last, off the heatBoth are finishing elements. Chopped parsley added while the sauce still simmers goes drab, and lemon juice held over heat loses its lift. Add both at the moment of service.
The pinch of sugarIt is there to correct the acidity of the reduced tomato, not to sweeten. Add it only after tasting; a very ripe tomato extract may need none at all.
YieldAbout a quart of finished sauce after simmering. If reheated, strain and re-season.

A Little History

This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the compendium he assembled after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house method exactly: nothing is made from scratch at the moment of service, because espagnole, veloute and glace de viande were standing preparations in the larder and a sauce was assembled from them in minutes. The name most likely honours a patron or a place, as hundreds of nineteenth-century garnishes and sauces did, though Ranhofer, who rarely explained his titles, gives no clue. What is more revealing is the tomato extract appended at the end. In the 1890s a cook wanting concentrated tomato had to make it, cooking down the strained juice to syrup, and Ranhofer treats the process as an afterthought worth two sentences. Commercially canned tomato paste would make that labour unnecessary within a generation, and with it went the clean, unbrowned tomato flavour this sauce was built around.