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Beefsteak Sauce
Heat a tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add six finely chopped shallots and gently brown for five minutes. Pour in one and a half gills demi-glace, two branches each freshly chopped parsley and chervil, four branches chives, the juice of a quarter lemon; lightly mix and let boil for six minutes, add, little by little, half ounce good butter, mix well and use as directed.
A short compound sauce built on demi-glace, closer to a bordelaise or sauce aux fines herbes than to the bottled steak sauce the name now suggests. The only difficult part is the base.
- The hinge: finish off the heatThe hinge: finish gently -- The half ounce of butter worked in "little by little" is monter au beurre. It is usually swirled in off the heat, a piece at a time; hard boiling after the butter goes in risks the sauce separating and turning greasy.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup (180 ml) of demi-glace.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with espagnole until it coats a spoon. Making it properly takes a day; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a hard-reduced homemade brown stock is the practical substitute. Thin canned gravy will not give the body this sauce depends on.
- Branches"Branch" translates the French branche and means a sprig or stem, not a bunch. Two sprigs each of parsley and chervil comes to only a teaspoon or two of each once chopped; four "branches" of chives means four blades, snipped fine.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh and it fades fast. If you cannot find it, use a little more parsley with a few tarragon leaves for the faint anise note; dried chervil contributes nothing.
- ShallotsSix shallots here probably means small ones. Two to three large modern shallots, about 1/3 cup chopped, is a reasonable quantity. Sweat them gently -- scorched shallot turns the finished sauce bitter.
- Timing and reductionSix minutes at a simmer both cooks out the raw shallot and tightens the sauce. Add the lemon juice as written but taste before the butter goes in; demi-glace concentrates salt as it reduces.
- YieldAbout 2/3 cup, enough to spoon over four steaks. Serve it at once; the herbs dull and the emulsion slackens within a quarter of an hour.
Beefsteak sauces of this type belong to the classical French repertoire that Alexander Filippini and his contemporaries carried into American hotel kitchens, where demi-glace served as the base from which a whole range of "small sauces" were derived. The pattern here — shallots softened in butter, moistened with brown sauce, sharpened with lemon, scented with fines herbes and finished with raw butter — is the standard formula behind a whole family of named sauces, and the choice of herbs or acid is often all that distinguishes one from the next. Hence a book of this period could print "one and a half gills demi-glace" without further comment.