No. 526

Portuguese Sauce

Sauce a la Portugaise

Rub on a loaf of sugar, the peel of one lemon and one orange; scrape the sugar off with a spoon to obtain the part colored by the peels, then put this in a saucepan with a coffeespoonful of coriander seeds and two gills of port wine; set the pan on the fire and when a white foam rises to the top, remove it at once and cover. Half an hour later pour the wine through a fine sieve and add to it three gills of bechamel sauce (No. 409), and two of tomato puree (No. 730); let the sauce boil up once then strain it through a tammy; add to it the juices of both the lemon and orange, besides a spoonful of chopped parsley.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's compound sauce is a béchamel crossed with tomato and aromatized port. Nothing about it is difficult, but the measurements and vessels belong to a professional kitchen of the 1890s.

GillsA gill is half a cup. So two gills of port is 1 cup, three gills of béchamel is 1½ cups, and two of tomato purée is 1 cup — about 3½ cups of liquid in all before straining losses.
The loaf of sugarNineteenth-century sugar came as a hard cone that could be rubbed against citrus to take up the oil from the peel, then scraped off in colored crumbs. With granulated sugar, rub the zest of one lemon and one orange into about 2 tablespoons of sugar with your fingertips until damp and fragrant; that is the same extraction.
CoffeespoonfulSmaller than a teaspoon — about half a teaspoon of coriander seed. Crack the seeds lightly rather than grinding them, since they are strained out later.
The hinge: watch the portThe instruction to pull the pan the instant a white foam rises means the wine should barely come to a simmer and no further. The point is a warm infusion of zest and coriander, not a reduction; boiling drives off the aromatics you just went to the trouble of capturing.
Béchamel and tomato puréeNos. 409 and 730 in the same book. A modern medium béchamel made with milk and a white roux, and a plain reduced tomato purée, will both stand in.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth the sauce was wrung through by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin, does the job.
Add the juice off the heatThe lemon and orange juice and the parsley go in after the sauce has boiled and been strained. Reheating after that point dulls the citrus and turns the parsley olive.
Yield and serviceYield -- About 3½ cups. The recipe itself gives no portion count and names no dish to serve it with.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what he cooked over three decades at Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is essentially the classical French repertoire as it stood before Escoffier codified it. Sauces named for countries in this tradition rarely have much to do with the country: a sauce portugaise is generally understood to mean a tomato sauce, tomatoes having reached the wider French kitchen partly through Iberian and Provençal cooking, and the name stuck to the ingredient rather than to any dish eaten in Lisbon. Ranhofer's version is more elaborate than most, layering port and citrus over the tomato and binding the whole thing with béchamel — an approach that also explains the rubbed sugar loaf, a standard confectioner's trick for capturing citrus oil in an age before anyone owned a microplane.