No. 516

Perigord Sauce

Sauce Perigord

Peel eight ounces of medium sized fresh Perigord truffles; cook them for five minutes with salt and Madeira wine, then remove from the fire and keep them in the covered saucepan. Make an infusion with two gills of Madeira wine, one ounce of raw ham, the truffle peelings, thyme and bay leaf, and a few sprigs of parsley. Put on the fire to reduce, four gills of good veloute (No. 415), and incorporate into it slowly, one gill of cream, and the same quantity of the Madeira wine infusion already prepared. When the sauce is succulent and sufficiently consistent, strain and pour it into a saucepan, mixing in with it the cooked truffles cut into thin slices; keep the sauce warm in a bain-marie.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A truffle sauce built on veloute, from the era when fresh black truffles arrived by the pound rather than the gram. The measurements are straightforward once the gills are converted; the difficulty is sourcing.

GillsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So two gills of Madeira for the infusion is 1 cup, four gills of veloute is 2 cups, and the cream and strained infusion are half a cup each.
Veloute (No. 415)Veloute here means a white roux slackened with veal or chicken stock and simmered long enough to skim clean. A modern chicken veloute made with unsalted stock works; anything thickened with cornstarch will not carry the reduction.
The trufflesEight ounces of fresh Perigord truffle (Tuber melanosporum) is an extravagant quantity today. Scaling the truffle down to an ounce or two and keeping the rest of the proportions is the practical route. Preserved truffles in jars are a different, flatter ingredient; if using them, skip the five-minute cooking, which will strip what aroma remains.
Peelings are not wasteThe infusion depends on them. The trimmings carry a good deal of aroma, which is presumably why the recipe cooks the truffles separately and steeps the skins in Madeira with ham and herbs.
MadeiraUse a dry to medium sercial or verdelho, not a sweet malmsey and not supermarket "Madeira cooking wine," which is generally salted. The recipe calls for reducing the veloute rather than the infusion, though letting the infusion lose its raw alcohol edge first is a reasonable liberty.
Raw hamAn uncooked dry-cured ham: prosciutto, serrano, or a scrap of country ham. One ounce is a flavouring, not a component, and it is strained out.
Add the truffles last, off the boilThe sliced truffles go in after straining and are only held warm. Boiling them in the finished sauce drives off the aromatics the sauce exists to deliver.
Bain-marieA bowl over barely steaming water, or a low burner with the pan set on a diffuser. The roux-and-cream base can catch or separate if held over direct heat.
YieldThe liquids come to about 3 cups before the reduction called for, so somewhat less finished sauce; enough for roughly eight servings over roast fillet, poultry, sweetbreads, or eggs.

A Little History

Perigord is the old provincial name for the country around the Dordogne in southwest France, and by the nineteenth century it had become shorthand on menus for black truffle in any form: a dish "a la perigourdine" meant truffles were involved. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, was cooking for a clientele that expected the full French repertoire, and he lists this sauce immediately before Perigueux sauce, its close relation built on a brown demi-glace rather than a white veloute. The pairing is instructive: the same truffle, the same Madeira, one sauce white and one brown, so the kitchen could match either to whatever it was serving. That truffles appear here by the half-pound reflects a period when the Perigord harvest was many times its present size; French production collapsed over the twentieth century, and the quantities in this recipe now read as a record of abundance rather than a shopping list.