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Ham Sauce
Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, add three finely chopped shallots and brown for two minutes; then add two ounces cooked lean ham cut into small dice pieces, half a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half a teaspoon freshly chopped chives, one gill of claret, and let reduce for five minutes. Pour in one and a half gills demi-glace; let reduce for ten minutes. Mix half tablespoon melted butter with a teaspoon flour, and add little by little to the sauce, continually mixing while adding, then use as required.
A compact brown sauce built on shallots, ham and claret, finished with a raw butter-and-flour paste. It assumes a stocked professional kitchen, chiefly for the demi-glace.
- GillsGill measures vary: an imperial gill is 5 fl oz, a US gill 4 fl oz (half a cup). Read the claret as roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup and the demi-glace as 3/4 to 1 cup, which after reduction leaves about a cup of finished sauce.
- Demi-glaceThe hinge of the recipe. It means a brown veal stock reduced with espagnole until it coats a spoon, not a stock cube dissolved in water. A good jarred demi-glace or a home-reduced brown veal stock will work; thin canned broth will not, since the recipe relies on the demi-glace for body and gloss.
- ClaretPeriod shorthand for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red does the job. The five-minute reduction is there to cook off the raw alcohol and concentrate the wine, so let it actually reduce rather than just warm through.
- Beurre manie, not a rouxButter and flour worked to a paste and whisked in at the end is a beurre manie; note that this version calls for the butter melted rather than softened. Add it in small amounts off a full boil and whisk each one in before the next, or it will lump. Half a tablespoon of butter to a teaspoon of flour is a light thickening; the sauce should nap a spoon, not stand up.
- Browning the shallotsTwo minutes over moderate heat is enough to colour finely chopped shallots. Push it further and the bitterness carries straight through the finished sauce, since nothing here masks it.
- The hamCooked lean ham means a firm boiled or baked ham cut into a fine dice, not a cured raw ham. It is added for savour and texture and needs no cooking; two ounces is about a third of a cup diced.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified because both the ham and a properly reduced demi-glace bring plenty. Taste at the end and correct then, not before.
This is a sauce in the classical French repertoire. The family of shallot-and-red-wine brown sauces runs through the escoffier-era codification of the mother sauces, where a great many savoury sauces descend from espagnole reduced to demi-glace, then flavoured in small batches to order. The construction here is entirely typical of that system: the labour lives upstream in the stock pot, and the individual sauce is a short piece of work. That the recipe simply says "pour in one and a half gills demi-glace" without explaining it tells you who the book expected to be reading. "Claret" as the standard English word for red Bordeaux is a period marker in itself, and its presence alongside chives and parsley places the dish in the anglicised French cooking that filled international cookbooks of the early twentieth century.