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Madeira Sauce
Place half gill hot tomato sauce and three-quarters of a gill hot demi-glace in a small saucepan on the fire and boil for five minutes. Then add two tablespoons good Madeira wine, half saltspoon cayenne pepper; mix well, then gently boil for five minutes more. Pour into a hot saucebowl and serve.
A small compound sauce that assumes you already have demi-glace and tomato sauce standing hot on the stove, as a professional kitchen would. Everything hinges on the demi-glace: with a good one this takes five minutes, without one it cannot be improvised.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. Half a gill of tomato sauce is 4 tablespoons; three-quarters of a gill of demi-glace is 6 tablespoons. Total yield is roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough to sauce two to four portions.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon. That is still assertive for two-thirds of a cup of sauce; start with a pinch and adjust at the end.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with espagnole until it coats a spoon. Commercial demi-glace concentrates and reduced veal or beef stock both work; a thin unreduced stock will not, since nothing in this recipe thickens it.
- Tomato sauceIn a professional book of this type this would most likely mean a classic cooked tomato sauce rather than a jarred pasta sauce. Passata reduced briefly with a little butter is the closest quick stand-in; avoid anything sweetened or heavy with garlic and herbs.
- The wine, and the second boilTwo tablespoons of Madeira into two-thirds of a cup of sauce is the whole point of the dish, and five more minutes of boiling will cook off much of its aroma. Modern practice is to simmer only a minute or two after the wine goes in, or to add half the Madeira off the heat at the end to keep the perfume.
- Which MadeiraUse a drinkable Sercial or Verdelho for a dry sauce, Bual if you want it rounder. Supermarket 'cooking' Madeira is often salted, which can read harsh once the sauce reduces.
- ServingServe at once in a warmed boat, with beef tenderloin, braised tongue, ham or veal. It dulls and over-reduces if held long over direct heat; keep it in a bain-marie rather than on the burner.
Madeira sauce is one of the small brown sauces of the French repertoire, built as this recipe builds it, on espagnole reduced to demi-glace and finished with a fortified wine. The habit of opening the instructions with two sauces already made and hot belongs to the professional kitchen, where a stockpot and the standard mother sauces would be running; such derivative-sauce systems were codified in the classic French tradition and later formalised by Escoffier, though nothing on this page fixes its date. The wine itself comes from the Portuguese island of Madeira, whose heated, oxidised style of production made it famously stable in barrel and heat, and it was a staple of Atlantic trade and of well-stocked cellars long before it settled into the sauce pan. The tomato here marks it as a variant rather than the plainest sauce Madere, which is simply demi-glace and wine.