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Colbert Sauce
Place in a small saucepan two gills demi-glace and one teaspoon meat extract then reduce it on the fire to one-half the quantity. Then add, little by little, one-half ounce good butter, briskly stirring while adding it. Squeeze in the juice of a sound lemon, adding a teaspoon finely minced parsley. Stir well and serve.
DEMI-GLACE (HALF-GLAZE) Have quite a large saucepan with ten quarts cold water on the hot range. Procure two fresh, white, calf's feet; cut them into small pieces and place in a small roasting pan with half pound raw ham, cut in pieces, one pound veal bones, two sliced carrots, two sliced onions, two sliced leeks, three branches parsley roots, one branch sliced celery; add ten cloves, four bay leaves, twenty allspices, two tablespoons whole black peppers, a teaspoon thyme and one and one-half tablespoons salt. Spread a little fat--about four tablespoons--over the vegetables. Place the pan in a hot oven and let get a nice golden colour. Remove from the oven, take up the feet and vegetables from the pan and plunge them into the pan with the ten quarts water; add one pint canned or the equivalent of fresh tomatoes. Let slowly boil for thirty minutes. Set the pan near the corner of the range, place the cover on and let slightly simmer. When any little parings of beef, veal, chicken, ham and vegetables are at hand, always place them into this important demi-glace. When opening cans of mushrooms add the mushroom liquor to this stock, also. Always keep the pan on the hot range until reduced to one-half the quantity. Heat in a large saucepan three ounces butter or good melted lard, adding six tablespoons flour. Stir well with a wooden spoon and let thoroughly brown on the fire for twenty minutes, occasionally stirring. Pour the above preparation into this pan, mix well, shift the pan on one side of the range, keeping it at a gentle simmering point for twelve hours. Then add half pint sherry; mix a little, strain the demi-glace through a Chinese strainer into a stone jar; let cool off, then cover the jar. Keep in a cool place and use as required. In winter it will keep in good condition for three or four weeks, but in hot weather it would be advisable to re-boil it once every week. This demi-glace is of vast importance, and it is necessary to always have some on hand. Therefore, when the supply is nearly exhausted, repeat the same operation.
N. B. Whatever quantity of demi-glace is required for each occasion, when taken up from the jar always dilute it with a little hot broth, so as to have it somewhat liquid before using.
Two recipes in one entry: a small finishing sauce, and the demi-glace that most of the work goes into. The sauce takes ten minutes if you have the base; the base takes two days.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of demi-glace, reduced to half a cup. The half ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- The hingeAdd the butter in small pieces off or barely on the heat, stirring briskly as the recipe says, so it blends in rather than melting to an oily layer. A roux-based demi-glace is more forgiving than a plain butter emulsion, but hard boiling after the butter goes in will still dull the gloss.
- Meat extractThis means a concentrated commercial extract of the Liebig or Bovril type, or a spoonful of homemade glace de viande. A teaspoon of yeast extract is not the same thing and will read as bitter. If your demi-glace is already strong, leave it out.
- Scale of the demi-glaceTen quarts of water reducing to five, then simmering twelve hours, is restaurant volume. Quartering everything works, though the smaller the batch the more closely the roasting-pan browning step needs watching to avoid scorching.
- Calf's feetThese supply the gelatin that makes the sauce cling. Ask a butcher to split them, or substitute pig's trotters or a pound of veal knuckle. Without a gelatinous cut the finished demi-glace will taste right and behave wrong.
- Oven and rouxThe book gives no temperatures; 'a hot oven' of this period is usually read as somewhere around 425-450F, and you want the vegetables and bones a deep golden brown, not pale. The separate brown roux really does need the full twenty minutes over moderate heat, stirring, to lose its raw-flour taste.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A sieve lined with damp muslin does the same job.
- StorageDisregard the instruction to keep it three or four weeks in a cool place with a weekly reboil. Cooked meat stock held at cellar temperature is a textbook medium for Clostridium perfringens; chill it fast, refrigerate no more than four days, or freeze it in one-cup portions, the quantity this sauce draws from the jar.
- Yield and servingThe sauce makes enough for two to four portions. It belongs on grilled or fried fish and on plain grilled meat, spooned over at the table rather than held warm, since it will separate if kept.
Sauce Colbert takes its name from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, finance minister to Louis XIV, one of a group of dishes and garnishes named for court figures long after their deaths. In the classical repertoire Colbert is a meat glaze worked into softened butter with lemon and parsley, closely related to beurre maître d'hôtel, and its usual companion is sole Colbert, the fish split, breaded, fried and opened out with the sauce dropped inside. The version here takes the other route, starting from liquid demi-glace and finishing it with butter rather than starting from butter, which suits a professional kitchen that always has the base on hand. The long note on the demi-glace tells you as much about the period as the sauce does: a hotel kitchen kept a stockpot working continuously, absorbing every trimming, mushroom liquor and bone that passed through, and its cook measured the pot's life in weeks rather than hours because refrigeration was still a luxury.