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Sauce, Montebello
Prepare a Bearnaise sauce. Reduce one and a half gills of tomato sauce in a saucepan on the fire to half a gill, then add it to the Bearnaise, mix well and use as required.
A two-line variation that assumes you already have béarnaise standing warm. Everything hinges on the tomato going in as a thick, concentrated paste rather than a watery sauce.
- GillsIn American usage a gill is 4 fl oz, half a US cup (the imperial gill is 5 fl oz). On the American measure, 1½ gills is 6 fl oz of tomato sauce reduced to 2 fl oz — a two-thirds reduction, to roughly a quarter cup.
- What "tomato sauce" meantIn a 1900s professional kitchen this is the cooked, roux- or stock-based tomato sauce of the classic repertoire, not passata and certainly not ketchup. Plain canned tomato purée or a well-seasoned, unsweetened tomato sauce simmered down until it mounds on the spoon gives the right result.
- The hinge: temperatureLet the reduction cool to warm — hand temperature — before folding it into the béarnaise. Adding it hot will take the emulsion past the point where the yolks set, and the sauce will curdle rather than thicken.
- Volume matters as much as flavourThe reduction is not just for concentration of taste; excess water breaks a butter emulsion. If the tomato is thin, keep reducing, even past the stated half gill.
- Holding itKeep the finished sauce warm but off direct heat, in a bain-marie; somewhere around 130°F is a comfortable working temperature. Much hotter and the yolks tighten; let it cool too far and the emulsion stiffens and can separate.
- Béarnaise proportionsThe recipe assumes you already have a béarnaise to hand: a tarragon-and-shallot vinegar reduction, egg yolks, butter. The book gives no quantities here; as a rough modern guide, four yolks and about a cup of butter make something like 1½ cups of sauce.
- ServingIntended for grilled or pan-roasted red meat: tournedos, entrecôte, lamb chops. Spoon it under or beside the meat rather than over, so the surface crust stays dry.
Béarnaise reddened with tomato is best known as sauce Choron, generally credited to Alexandre Étienne Choron, chef at the Voisin in Paris in the later nineteenth century, but nineteenth-century kitchens attached several names to what is essentially the same mixture, and Montebello is one of them. The name is often said to point back to the Napoleonic marshalcy — Jean Lannes fought at Montebello in Lombardy in June 1800 and was created Duc de Montebello in 1808, and the title stayed in French public life through the century — part of a long habit of naming garnishes and sauces for battles, generals and diplomats, though nothing directly ties the sauce to the dukedom. Filippini, writing from Delmonico's for an American readership, recorded these variants the way a working chef would: a one-line instruction addressed to someone who already has the mother sauce on the stove and needs only to know the ratio.