No. 561

Westphalian Sauce

Sauce Westphalienne

Put three gills of white wine and half a pound of minced, lean Westphalia ham into a saucepan with a bunch of parsley garnished with one bay leaf and the same quantity of thyme, some mignonette, salt and nutmeg. Moisten the whole with two gills of veal blond stock (No. 423), then reduce and finish with four gilis of espagnole (No. 414), reduce again to the proper consistency, then strain through a tammy, and just when ready to serve stir in two ounces of butter and the juice of a lemon; pass throngh a tammy and serve.

← No. 560 Villeroi Sauce Hot Sauces No. 562 White Sauce; White English Sauce and White S →

For the Modern Kitchen

A short reduction sauce from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, built on two preparations the book assumes you already have on hand. The measurements are in gills, and the ham is the whole point.

Gills into cupsA gill is half a cup. So: 1½ cups white wine, 1 cup veal stock, 2 cups espagnole, finished with 2 oz (½ stick) butter and the juice of one lemon.
Westphalia hamA dry-cured, cold-smoked raw ham from northwestern Germany, traditionally smoked over beech and juniper. Not a cooked pink deli ham. Speck or an unsmoked prosciutto-type ham is the nearest substitute, and either will bring plenty of salt with it.
Salt last, or not at allHalf a pound of cured ham reduced into two cups of espagnole will season the sauce on its own. Hold the salt the recipe calls for until after the second reduction and taste before adding any.
MignonetteIn this book, coarsely cracked white peppercorns rather than the shallot-and-vinegar relish served with oysters. A generous pinch, cracked not ground.
The two base preparationsEspagnole (No. 414) is the brown mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. Veal blond (No. 423) is a pale veal stock, only lightly coloured rather than built on deeply roasted bones. Without a good espagnole this sauce has nothing to reduce onto; a strong homemade brown veal stock reduced to a light nappe is the practical stand-in.
A tammyA tightly woven worsted cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same work. The recipe strains twice, before and after mounting with butter — the second pass catches any ham fibre and gives the gloss.
Butter off the heatAdd the butter and lemon with the pan pulled from the flame and the sauce below a simmer. Boiling after the butter goes in will break the emulsion and dull the finish.
YieldRoughly 1½ to 2 cups after reduction, enough for eight to ten portions. The recipe itself names no accompaniment.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an exhaustive record of the classical French repertoire as it was actually cooked in an American grand restaurant. Sauces built by name on a regional ingredient were a standing convention of that repertoire — a sauce à la westphalienne is generally understood to be one carrying Westphalian ham. The ham itself has been made in Westphalia since long before the cookbook trade took notice; it is generally traced to the region's oak- and beech-mast pig husbandry, and by the nineteenth century it was a luxury export well enough known in Britain and America that a menu could print the word and expect it to be understood. Its place here is structural rather than sentimental: cured pork gives a brown sauce a depth of salt and smoke that stock alone cannot, and reducing it into espagnole was one way to get that depth without serving the meat itself.