No. 529

Provencal Sauce,fat or Lean

Sauce a la Provencale en Gras ou en Maigre

Fry lightly in two gills of oil, half a pound of minced onions, two ounces of ham (or smoked salmon, if for lean), a pinch of parsley leaves, a crushed and chopped clove of garlic, thyme, bay leaf, mignonette, nutmeg, a pinch of ground cloves; dilute with a pint of fish stock (No. 195), if for lean, or veal blond (No. 423) if for fat; let cook, despumate, and when the broth is reduced to a third, add a pint of espagnole (No. 414), if for brown or allemande (No. 407) if for white; one or the other, for fat or lean. Stir in two ounces of fresh butter and the juice of a lemon to finish.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in the shorthand of a professional brigade: every component sauce is a cross-reference, and the two versions run in parallel down the page. Untangled, it is a garlic-and-onion reduction finished into a mother sauce.

Fat or leanEn gras uses meat: ham and veal stock. En maigre is the fast-day version, with smoked salmon standing in for the ham and fish stock for the veal. Choose one column and stay in it.
GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of oil is one cup — a great deal for half a pound of onions. Half that will sweat them adequately if you are not building a restaurant-scale sauce.
MignonetteNot the flower and not a cut of meat: poivre mignonnette is coarsely cracked black pepper, sometimes with white pepper and coriander. A generous pinch, cracked in a mortar or under a pan.
DespumateSkim. As the reduction simmers, albumen and fat rise as a grey scum at the edge of the pan; lift it off with a ladle rather than stirring it back in. This is what keeps the finished sauce clear rather than muddy.
Espagnole and allemandeEspagnole (No. 414) is the brown mother sauce built on roux and brown stock; allemande (No. 407) is velouté thickened with egg yolks and cream. Espagnole in particular is a long proposition in the original, and allemande depends on having a velouté already made. A good reduced brown sauce or a velouté enriched with a liaison of yolk and cream will carry the dish.
The reduction is the pointThe pint of stock must go down to a third before the finishing sauce joins it. Rush this and the garlic and onion stay raw-tasting and the sauce is thin; the whole method is a concentration.
Butter and lemon off the heatWhisk in the two ounces of butter and the lemon juice with the pan pulled aside. Boiling after the butter goes in breaks the emulsion, and boiled lemon juice turns flat and slightly bitter.
Straining and yieldRanhofer does not say to strain, and a rustic Provencale is usually left with its onion. Passing it through a chinois gives the smoother sauce expected alongside the rest of this chapter. Yield depends on how much of the oil is skimmed off, but expect at least a pint and a half of finished sauce.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is essentially the French classical repertoire transplanted whole. A sauce à la provençale is identified by garlic and olive oil — the two things northern French cookery of the period treated as distinctly southern — and Provençale garnishes almost always carry the same signature. The gras/maigre pairing here is older than the restaurant: Catholic abstinence days barred meat but not fish, so professional kitchens kept parallel versions of standard sauces, one built on veal stock and one on fish, with smoked salmon or anchovy doing the savoury work that ham does on other days. By Ranhofer's time the distinction was as much menu convention as observance, but the recipes were still written both ways.