No. 518

Pickle Sauce

Sauce aux Cornichons

Slice two ounces of pickles into thin pieces, and lay them in a saucepan with one gill of vinegar and a pinch of mignonette; let it boil up quickly and reduce it to half its quantity, then add one pint of espagnole (No 414), two gills of veal blond (No. 423), a bay leaf, and as much thyme. Despumate the sauce for fifteen minutes, then suppress the bay leaf and thyme, and serve.

← No. 517 Perigueux Sauce Hot Sauces No. 519 Piedmontese Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic brown-sauce derivative from Ranhofer's kitchen, built on two components made elsewhere in the book. The work is in the base sauces, not in this page.

Cornichons, not dill spears"Cornichons" are small tart gherkins pickled in vinegar, often with tarragon ot ccured in brine alone, and not sweet pickle. Two ounces sliced thin comes to roughly a third to a half cup.
A gillHalf a cup, so four fluid ounces. Two gills of veal blond is one cup.
MignonetteCoarsely cracked peppercorns, conventionally white pepper, crushed rather than ground to powder. The recipe specifies only a pinch.
EspagnoleRanhofer's No. 414 is his brown mother sauce, in the usual nineteenth-century pattern of a brown roux moistened with brown stock and long simmered. A well-reduced homemade brown stock thickened lightly stands in; diluted canned demi-glace concentrate will tend to read saltier.
Veal blondBlond de veau — a pale veal stock from bones blanched but not browned. Its job is to thin the espagnole and lengthen the flavour, so an unsalted light veal or chicken stock serves.
DespumateTo skim. Hold the sauce at a bare simmer for the fifteen minutes and lift off the scum and fat as they rise at the edge; a boil emulsifies the fat back in and dulls the sauce.
Order of operationsThe vinegar-and-pickle reduction is what makes this sauce sharp rather than merely brown, so take the gill down by half, to about four tablespoons, before the espagnole goes in.
Yield and useRoughly a pint and a half of finished sauce once the despumation has taken its toll. A sharp brown sauce of this kind would suit fatty boiled or braised meats that want an acid cut, though this page does not say what it was served with.

A Little History

Sauce aux cornichons belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of small sauces spun off from espagnole, the system codified by Carême and inherited by Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894. The logic of that system is visible in the cross-references: nothing is made from scratch on this page, because the mother sauce and the stock are standing ready in the kitchen, and a cook's job is to finish a pint of it to order. Pickled cucumbers with boiled beef is a pairing that also runs through German, Polish and Russian cooking, but here the vinegar is disciplined into a reduction and the pickles arrive as a garnish suspended in a glossy brown sauce rather than sliced onto the plate.