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Sauce Poivrade
Finely chop a medium-sized white onion, one carrot, and fry in a saucepan with a level tablespoon butter to a nice golden colour, then add half ounce finely minced raw ham, one saltspoon thyme, half sprig bay leaf, one saltspoon marjoram, three cloves and a teaspoon freshly crushed black peppers. Moisten with half gill tarragon vinegar, one gill hot broth or water and reduce to one half the quantity. Then add one gill demi-glace and a saltspoon cayenne pepper; gently stir for one minute, then reduce for five minutes. Strain through a cheesecloth into a saucebowl and use as required.
A classic French pepper sauce for game and dark meat, built on demi-glace. It is a small-batch sauce and the measurements are period ones, so translate before you start.
- The unitsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of tarragon vinegar is 1/4 cup and a gill of broth or demi-glace is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Demi-glace is the whole sauceEverything else is flavouring for the half cup of demi-glace. Use a real reduced brown veal stock or a good commercial demi-glace; a bouillon cube dissolved in water will give you thin, salty vinegar broth and nothing else.
- Pepper timingA full teaspoon of crushed black pepper simmered through two reductions turns harsh and slightly bitter. Standard French practice is to hold most of the pepper back and add it for the last few minutes of the final reduction, off the strong boil, then strain.
- Raw hamHalf an ounce of "raw ham" means an uncooked cured ham -- prosciutto, speck or a scrap of pancetta. It is there for salt and depth, so salt the finished sauce only at the end.
- CayenneA saltspoon of cayenne in half a cup of sauce is assertive by current taste. Add a pinch, taste after the final reduction, and build from there.
- StrainingPress the solids firmly in the cheesecloth or through a fine chinois rather than letting the sauce drip. The onion and carrot hold a good deal of the reduction.
- YieldYou will finish with roughly half a cup of finished sauce -- enough for four small servings of venison, duck or beef. Double the quantities if you want more.
Poivrade is one of the standard brown derivative sauces of the classical French repertoire, its name simply from poivre, pepper, and its natural home is game: venison, hare, wild duck. In the Escoffier scheme it descends from espagnole reduced to demi-glace, sharpened with a vinegar or marinade reduction over a browned mirepoix, and it is the parent of further sauces -- add game marinade and it becomes sauce chevreuil, add redcurrant jelly and cream and it moves toward sauce grand veneur. The version here, from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, reflects the Delmonico's kitchen he came out of: the assumption that a cook has demi-glace already standing in the range, and that a "sauce" is a short finishing operation rather than a day's work. Tarragon vinegar rather than plain wine vinegar appears in a number of period recipes, and the small quantity of raw ham in the base adds cured depth without adding stock.