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Bordelaise Sauce
To Tomato Sauce, add one-third cup minced shallots, a minced clove of garlic, and a teaspoon of chopped parsley cooked gently till yellowed in one tablespoon Mazola. Add a little lemon juice and if convenient two tablespoons beef marrow. Serve with any kind of boiled meat or fish, meat or fish loaf or with sliced tenderloin of beef.
A derivative sauce that assumes you have already made the book's tomato sauce, and that assumes an ingredient most home cooks no longer keep on hand. Two details carry it: the shallots must soften without browning, and the marrow goes in at the very end.
- The baseYou need the book's Tomato Sauce first; the recipe gives no quantity for it. Any smooth, lightly thickened tomato sauce without herbs or sugar will stand in.
- "Cooked gently till yellowed"Sweat the shallots, garlic and parsley over low heat until translucent and just tinged gold, three to five minutes. Once the garlic browns the sauce turns acrid, and shallots scorch faster than onion.
- MazolaCorn oil. The brand name standing in for the fat points to a Corn Products promotional book. Any neutral oil works; a tablespoon of butter gives a rounder sauce.
- Beef marrowAsk a butcher for cut marrow bones and push the marrow out, or buy it removed. Dice it, blanch it in barely simmering salted water for a minute or two until it turns from pink to ivory, then drain and fold it into the finished sauce off the heat. Boiled hard it melts to grease; left raw it is unpleasantly waxy.
- Lemon juice"A little" means a teaspoon or two, added at the end and tasted — the tomato already brings acid, and the lemon is there to lift it, not to sharpen it further.
- One-third cup shallotsThat is roughly two large shallots, minced fine. It is a generous amount and looks deliberate; shallot is the defining flavour here.
- Yield and servingThe recipe states no yield. Spoon it over the meat rather than pooling it under, and hold it warm without simmering once the marrow is in.
Sauce bordelaise takes its name from Bordeaux and is classically built on red wine reduced with shallots, thickened with demi-glace and finished with poached beef marrow — the marrow is what earns a dish the tag à la moelle. What appears here is a shortcut version: the wine and brown stock are gone, tomato sauce stands in for the whole foundation, and the marrow is demoted to "if convenient." That substitution says a good deal about the book, which appears from its use of the brand name to have been issued to promote Mazola corn oil and translates French restaurant cookery into terms a home cook with a bottle of oil and a can of tomatoes could manage. Marrow bones were cheap and ordinary in the early twentieth century, sold for soup and for spreading on toast; the fact that the recipe treats them as optional suggests the audience was already drifting away from the butcher's counter.