No. 534

Roman Sauce

Sauce Romaine

Mince two ounces of celery root and put it into a saucepan with a coffeespoonful of coriander seeds, the same quantity of powdered sugar, a small clove of garlic crushed and chopped, a bunch of parsley and basil garnished with two bay leaves, and a quarter of a bottleful of champagne; let simmer for thirty minutes, then add one pint of espagnole (No. 414), and one gill of veal blond (No. 423); strain the whole through a tammy, and stir in two ounces of fresh butter and the juice of a lemon, also two ounces of Sultana raisins washed and boiled in half a gill of Madeira wine.

← No. 533 Robert Sauce Hot Sauces No. 535 Russian Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A sweet-sour brown sauce built on two of Ranhofer's foundation preparations, so most of the work happens before you reach this page. Read it as an infusion, a fortification, and a finish.

The two cross-referencesEspagnole (No. 414) is the classic brown sauce: brown roux, brown veal stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Veal blond (No. 423) is a pale, well-reduced veal stock used to reinforce flavour without darkening. Without both, this is not the sauce; a good reduced brown veal stock plus a light stock is the nearest honest substitute.
Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill of Madeira is 2 fl oz, about 4 tablespoons. A coffeespoonful is smaller than a modern teaspoon; it is usually reckoned at roughly half of one. A quarter of a bottleful of champagne is about 6 fl oz.
ChampagneAny dry sparkling wine, or a crisp still white, will do the same job here; the bubbles are lost within seconds of heating. What matters is acidity, which balances the sugar and raisins.
Celery rootTwo ounces is a small wedge off a celeriac, minced fine. Old celery root can be woody and bitter at the core; trim it out. Celery stalk is not a substitute for the flavour, though it will pass in an emergency.
The tammyA tammy was a fine worsted cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, then a pass through a doubled square of muslin, gives the same clarity.
Butter and lemon go in off the heatButter and lemon go in after straining -- The recipe adds both at the end, with no further cooking called for. In practice the finished sauce should not be boiled again once the butter is in, or the emulsion breaks and the shine goes flat. Add the lemon last, taste, and hold warm rather than hot.
The raisinsSimmer the sultanas in the Madeira until plump and the wine is nearly gone, then fold them in at the end. Boiled in the sauce itself they cloud it and the sugar tips the balance too far.
Yield and servingSomething over a pint after straining, enough for eight to ten servings. It is conventionally served with venison, hare, wild duck and roast tongue, where the sweetness has something gamey to work against.

A Little History

Sauce romaine belongs to a small family of nineteenth-century French sauces built on sugar, dried fruit and vinegar or wine, generally traced to the medieval taste for sweet-sour seasoning that survived in game cookery long after it left the rest of the table. The name is conventional rather than geographic: French kitchens attached national labels to sauces freely, and this one is Roman chiefly in the way a great many others are Russian or Polish. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working record of that kitchen, which is why the recipe reads as an instruction to a cook who already has espagnole and veal blond simmering on the stove. Escoffier codified a close relative a decade later, and the sauce continued to appear on European menus into the twentieth century as an accompaniment to venison.