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Chateaubriand Sauce
Place one gill and a half demi-glace in a small pan, with one tablespoon port wine, the juice of quarter of a lemon, a teaspoon currant jelly, a saltspoon freshly chopped parsley, one saltspoon chopped chives, one saltspoon chopped chervil and a half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix all well together, boil for five minutes and use as required.
A short compound sauce that depends entirely on the quality of the demi-glace underneath it. Everything else is seasoning.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so a gill and a half is 3/4 cup of demi-glace. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; the half saltspoon of cayenne is an eighth of a teaspoon, which is assertive but not reckless in 3/4 cup of sauce.
- Demi-glace is the recipeThis is a finishing sauce, not a stock reduction from scratch. You need a proper demi-glace — brown stock reduced with espagnole until it coats a spoon. Commercial glace de viande diluted to sauce consistency works; canned gravy does not, and thin stock will leave you with sweet port water.
- Add the herbs lastParsley, chives and chervil boiled for five minutes lose most of their aroma and go drab. Reduce the demi-glace with the port, lemon and jelly for the five minutes, then take the pan off the heat and stir the herbs in. Chervil in particular is fragile and worth sourcing fresh rather than substituting dried.
- The currant jelly"Currant jelly" in this period conventionally means red currant rather than black. It is there for a sweet-tart edge against the port, so a bare teaspoon is enough.
- PortUse a tawny or ruby port, not a white or a heavily sweetened cooking port. One tablespoon is small enough that most of the alcohol will have boiled away in the five minutes.
- ConsistencyFive minutes at a boil will tighten the sauce noticeably. Aim for something that naps the back of a spoon and slides off slowly; if it goes past that, loosen with a spoonful of stock rather than water.
- YieldAbout 2/3 cup after reduction, which sauces two to four portions of grilled beef. Spoon it around the meat rather than over it if the steak has a crust worth keeping.
Chateaubriand is the thick cut from the head of the beef tenderloin, and the name is generally traced to the writer and diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand, whose cook is traditionally credited with the preparation in the 1820s. The classic French sauce chateaubriand as codified by Escoffier is a white wine and shallot reduction finished with demi-glace, maître d'hôtel butter and tarragon; the version here, with port, red currant jelly and a trio of fines herbes, leans in the direction of an Anglo-American steak sauce. The grand French sauce vocabulary was by this period the shared professional language of restaurant cooking, and a cook who could keep demi-glace on hand could produce a number of named sauces from it in minutes.