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Mustard Sauce
Place three tablespoons of good demi-glace in a bowl with a good teaspoon French mustard, a saltspoon each finely chopped chives and a chervil. Mix all well together and use as required.
A compound sauce in the classical mould: a finished brown sauce warmed and flavoured off the heat. The whole thing takes under a minute once the demi-glace exists.
- Do not let it boilAs written the sauce is simply mixed cold in a bowl, with no heat at all. If you do warm the demi-glace, warm it before the mustard goes in: mustard loses pungency and can turn bitter when heated hard, and the chopped herbs go grey.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So roughly 1/4 teaspoon each of chopped chives and chervil against three tablespoons of sauce: a modest amount. The recipe gives no portion guidance beyond 'use as required'.
- "A chervil"Probably a compositor's slip for "a saltspoon of chervil". Fresh chervil is anise-scented and delicate; if you cannot find it, use a little flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves rather than dried chervil, which tastes of nothing.
- Demi-glaceBrown veal stock reduced with espagnole sauce until it coats a spoon. Good commercial demi-glace concentrates exist and are the practical route; reconstitute to a syrupy, not soupy, consistency or the mustard will taste raw and thin.
- French mustardThe term means a prepared mustard in the French manner, most often Dijon-style — smooth and sharpened with wine — though it was also used of the milder, darker Bordeaux type. Not the bright yellow American condiment, and not English mustard, which is far hotter and will overwhelm three tablespoons of sauce.
- YieldA little over three tablespoons. It scales directly; keep the ratio at roughly one teaspoon of mustard to three tablespoons of demi-glace.
- What to put it onThe book gives no clue beyond "use as required". A mustard-and-demi-glace sauce of this type is conventionally served with grilled meat and fish — steak, kidneys, pork chops, grilled herring — where the mustard cuts the richness of the reduced stock.
Sauce moutarde belongs to the family of small compound sauces that Escoffier and his contemporaries codified around the turn of the twentieth century: a mother sauce, here demi-glace, plus one or two defining flavourings added at the last moment. The economy of the instruction o cines, no straining, three lines o demdemi-glace was already to hand, which is exactly the assumption that makes classical sauce cookery difficult to reproduce at home. Mustard has been paired with grilled and boiled meats in French cooking for centuries, and Dijon's mustard makers had guild regulation of their trade from at least the seventeenth century; what is distinctive here is the mounting of that flavour on a refined brown sauce rather than serving it as a condiment on the side. The reader is expected to know what demi-glace is and how much sauce a plate needs.