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Shallots Sauce
Chop up very finely eight peeled shallots, place in a small saucepan with a tablespoon butter and gently fry for five minutes, stirring frequently meanwhile; pour in one gill demi-glace, half gill tomato sauce and two tablespoons sherry; add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and the juice of a lemon; lightly mix, then boil for fifteen minutes, remove and serve as directed.
A short brown shallot sauce of the classic French repertoire, written for a kitchen that already had demi-glace on the stove. The whole thing hinges on that base.
- Demi-glaceOne gill is 4 fl oz (half a cup) by US reckoning, 5 fl oz if the book is following imperial measure. Classic demi-glace is brown stock and espagnole reduced by half; a good reduced veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, will stand in. Commercial concentrates work but are salty, so hold back on any seasoning until the reduction is finished.
- Gill measuresA gill is 4 fl oz (1/2 cup) in US usage, 5 fl oz imperial, so a half gill of tomato sauce is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup. "Tomato sauce" here means the classic cooked sauce tomate, not ketchup and not a jarred pasta sauce.
- Sweat, do not brownFive minutes in butter over gentle heat should leave the shallots soft and translucent. Browned shallots turn bitter and the bitterness carries straight through the finished sauce.
- The fifteen-minute boilRead this as a steady reduction rather than a hard boil; the point is to concentrate the sauce and cook the raw edge off the sherry. Keep it at a bare simmer and skim, or the butter will split out.
- Lemon juiceA whole lemon in roughly a cup of liquid is assertive. Add half, taste at the end of the reduction, and adjust; acid concentrates as the sauce reduces.
- ParsleyHalf a teaspoon added at the start will be dead by the end of fifteen minutes. Hold it back and stir it in off the heat if you want any freshness from it.
- Yield and serviceAbout 3/4 to 1 cup, enough for four servings. "Serve as directed" points back to whatever dish the original book paired it with, which this page does not tell us; sauces of this type were generally sent out with grilled or pan-seared meats. Strain it if you want a smooth sauce, leave it as is for texture.
Shallot sauces sit in the family of small brown sauces built on demi-glace that Escoffier codified in Le Guide Culinaire (1903), when many sauces in a professional kitchen began life as a batch of espagnole reduced with brown stock. The sherry, tomato and lemon here suggest a professional rather than a household sauce: it assumes a stockpot already running and a cook who can reach for the base without a second thought. Shallots have often been described in English cookery writing as the finer, milder member of the onion family, which may be why they appear so often in sauces meant for grilled meat. That this recipe ends with "serve as directed" suggests it came from a system of cross-referenced sauces, with the reader expected to know where it belonged.