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Sauce, Chasseur
Place six finely chopped, sound shallots in a small saucepan with tablespoon melted butter and fry a nice light colour. Pour in one and a half gills white wine and let reduce until nearly dry, pour in one gill demi-glace and a gill tomato sauce, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon pepper and twelve sliced canned mushrooms. Lightly mix, boil ten minutes, then use as directed.
A classic brown hunter's sauce, written for a kitchen that already had demi-glace and tomato sauce standing on the stove. The measurements are the main obstacle.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of wine is 3/4 cup, and the demi-glace and tomato sauce are half a cup each. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: half a teaspoon of salt, a quarter teaspoon of pepper.
- Demi-glace is the hingeEverything the sauce tastes of comes from this. Brown stock reduced with a brown roux and reduced again is the classic version; a good commercial demi-glace concentrate or a strongly reduced veal stock will stand in. Plain beef broth will not, and no amount of boiling will fix it.
- Reduce the wine properly"Until nearly dry" means glazed shallots and a film of syrup in the pan, not merely reduced by half. Stopping early leaves a raw acidity that the ten-minute boil will not cook out.
- Six shallotsThat is a large quantity for a cup of finished sauce by modern taste. Three or four medium shallots, chopped fine, gives the same character without the bulk. Sweat them gently rather than browning hard; scorched shallot turns bitter.
- The mushroomsCanned mushrooms were a common restaurant convenience in this period. Fresh cremini or button mushrooms, sliced and sauteed in butter until their water has cooked off, are better; add them with the demi-glace so they finish in the sauce.
- Parsley timingAdding chopped parsley at the start of a ten-minute boil kills its colour and perfume. Add half at the beginning if you want the herbal depth, and the rest off the heat just before serving.
- FinishingSkim any fat that rises during the boil, and check seasoning at the end rather than the beginning, since reduction concentrates the salt already in the demi-glace. A knob of cold butter swirled in off the heat gives the gloss a restaurant sauce is expected to have.
- YieldRoughly a cup after the ten-minute boil, enough for four small portions of sauteed chicken, veal or steak.
Chasseur is simply French for "hunter," and the sauce belongs to the family of quick brown sauces built on shallots, white wine and mushrooms that are traditionally said to have been associated with game cooked after the hunt, though by the time this book was printed it was a standard item in the hotel kitchen repertoire and turned up more often on chicken and veal than on anything shot. Its structure is pure Escoffier-era brigade cooking: a small sauce made in minutes by combining demi-glace, itself a derivative of espagnole, with tomato sauce, both of which the sauce cook kept ready all service. That reliance on stock made in advance is exactly why the recipe reads so briefly here, and why it is the hardest part to reproduce at home. The instruction to "use as directed" is a reminder that this page is a component, not a dish, and would have been cross-referenced from meat and poultry entries elsewhere in the book.