Home › The World's Kitchen › Sauce, Bennett
Sauce, Bennett
Thoroughly wash, wipe and slice four fresh mushrooms, place in a saucepan with three finely chopped shallots, one teaspoon butter, and cook on fire for five minutes, stirring once in a while. Pour in one gill white wine, let reduce to almost a glaze, then pour in one and a half gills demi-glace. Add four stoned and finely sliced large olives, six fresh tarragon leaves, and season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix well, let boil for ten minutes, remove to table, add little by little a half ounce good butter, mix with spoon while adding it, then use as required.
A compound brown sauce in the classic mould: aromatics sweated, wine reduced to a glaze, demi-glace added, finished off the heat with butter. The measurements are turn-of-the-century restaurant shorthand.
- The hinge: mount the butter off the heat"Remove to table" means take the pan off the fire before whisking in the final half ounce of butter. If the sauce boils after the butter goes in, the emulsion breaks and you get a greasy film instead of gloss.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So one gill of white wine is 1/2 cup, and one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons salt is 1/2 teaspoon, one saltspoon cayenne is 1/4 teaspoon — assertive for roughly a cup of sauce, and worth adding in stages if your demi-glace is already seasoned.
- Demi-glaceHere this means a properly reduced brown sauce, not a bouillon cube dissolved in water. Good frozen or jarred demi-glace works; if using unreduced stock, reduce it hard first or the sauce will stay thin, since there is no thickening step in the recipe.
- "Cook on fire for five minutes"Sweat the mushrooms and shallots in the teaspoon of butter over medium heat until the mushroom liquid has come out and largely gone. Colour is not the aim, but the pan should be dry before the wine goes in.
- Olives"Stoned" is pitted. The recipe specifies only large olives; green olives in brine are the likeliest reading. Rinse them if the brine is very salty, as the sauce carries only about half a teaspoon of salt.
- TarragonSix fresh leaves is a light hand. The recipe adds them before the ten-minute boil; if you want more anise note, hold them back until near the end. Dried tarragon is a poor substitute here; use half a teaspoon at most if that is all you have.
- Yield and useAbout a cup, enough for four small servings. It suits steak and grilled meats, and chicken or veal; the recipe says only "use as required." Butter-finished sauces are best served promptly, as long holding over heat risks separation.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries dozens of small compound sauces named for individuals. A "Sauce Bennett" may honour one of the Bennetts of the New York Herald — James Gordon Bennett Jr. is the usual guess — but the book offers no attribution and none is documented. Structurally the sauce is a duxelles-and-wine reduction slid into demi-glace, a standard nineteenth-century French method by which a kitchen could spin one mother sauce into many named variants; the olives and tarragon are all that distinguish it from its neighbours.