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Sauce Cabaret
Chop up together very finely three medium-sized, sound shallots, half clove sound garlic and four branches fresh parsley. Place all in a mortar, add three-quarters of an ounce good butter, a tablespoon meat glaze and the juice of quarter of a sound lemon. Pound to a firm paste and use as required, always cold.
This is a compound butter, not a poured sauce: a pounded paste of shallot, garlic, parsley and meat glaze that is sliced or spooned onto hot food and left to melt. Everything hinges on the meat glaze, which is the only thing in it carrying any depth.
- Meat glazeGlace de viande is brown stock reduced until it is syrupy and sets firm when chilled. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced homemade beef stock stands in; a bouillon cube does not, as the salt is far too high for the volume.'
- Quantities in modern termsThree-quarters of an ounce of butter is about 1 1/2 tablespoons. With the shallots and glaze this yields roughly 1/3 cup of paste, enough for four to six portions of grilled meat.
- The mortarA mortar gives the smooth, firm-paste texture the recipe wants. A small food processor works, but pulse rather than run it, or the shallot turns watery and the paste will not hold a firm shape.
- Butter temperatureHave the butter soft enough to work but not melted. Melted butter separates from the lemon juice and glaze, and the paste will never set into something you can slice.
- GarlicHalf a clove is a deliberately small amount. Use a small clove and mash it thoroughly rather than leaving pieces.
- "Always cold"Roll the finished paste in parchment, chill until firm, and cut coins to lay on hot steak, chops, or grilled fish. Warming it in a pan defeats the point: the appeal is cold butter melting into the meat's juices at the table.
- KeepingIt holds three or four days covered in the refrigerator, or a month wrapped tightly and frozen. The raw shallot changes character on standing, so it is best made close to serving.
Compound butters of this type -- beurres composés in the French repertoire that Filippini and his contemporaries worked from -- were the professional kitchen's shortcut to flavour at the moment of service, a way to finish a plate without holding a sauce on the stove all evening. The name may point to the restaurant or cabaret trade rather than to a place, though this is not documented; menus of the period attached names like this freely, and such labels are often house inventions rather than fixed formulas. What dates it is the tablespoon of meat glaze, assumed to be on hand as a matter of course. A hotel kitchen of the period reduced its own brown stock daily; a home cook would have needed to buy or make it.