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Sauce Picard
Place in a saucepan six finely chopped shallots with half gill good tarragon vinegar. Let reduce on brisk fire until almost dry, being careful not to allow to burn, then pour in one and a half gills demi-glace with one teaspoon cayenne. Mix well, let boil for ten minutes, then add bit by bit a half ounce fresh butter and sharply mix while adding. Sauce is then ready for use.
A short reduction sauce built on demi-glace, finished with butter. It comes together in about twenty minutes if the demi-glace is already made, and the only real technique is the finish.
- The gillIn American books of this period a gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. So half a gill of vinegar is 1/4 cup, and one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup.
- Cayenne, with cautionCayenne — A full teaspoon of cayenne in 3/4 cup of sauce is ferocious by current standards. Start with 1/4 teaspoon and adjust upward.
- Demi-glaceReal demi-glace is brown sauce and veal stock reduced together by half. Commercial concentrates are far saltier than the homemade version this book assumes, so dilute them fully and hold back on any added salt.
- "Almost dry" is the hingeThe shallot-and-vinegar reduction should be a damp mound with no free liquid pooling, but still glossy. Take it past that and the shallots scorch, which gives the finished sauce a bitter edge that nothing later will fix.
- Mounting the butterPull the pan off direct heat before whisking in the half ounce (one tablespoon) of cold butter, piece by piece. Butter added to a boiling sauce breaks and leaves an oily film rather than the sheen intended here.
- Hold it warm, not hotOnce buttered, keep the sauce below a simmer; bringing it back to the boil risks splitting it. If it must wait, hold it in a bain-marie.
- YieldSomewhat under 3/4 cup once it has boiled ten minutes, enough for a few portions of grilled or roast red meat. Strain the shallots out if a smooth sauce is wanted, though the original does not call for straining.
The name follows the standard nineteenth-century French practice of tagging a sauce with a region or a person, in this case Picardy, the old province north of Paris; the attribution is conventional rather than documented, and Picard sauces of this sort are rarely found in the classical repertory under a fixed formula. Structurally it is a close cousin of sauce diable and sauce Bercy: shallots reduced hard in an acid, brown sauce added, heat carried by cayenne, butter whisked in at the end for gloss. That the recipe assumes a pot of demi-glace already standing in the kitchen suggests a reader with a professional kitchen behind them, since demi-glace is a long undertaking built from veal bones and espagnole.