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Brown Sauce (One pound of round beef one)
One pound of round beef, one pound of veal, cut from the lower part of the leg; eight tablespoons of butter, one small onion, one small slice of carrot, four cloves, a very small piece of mace, five tablespoonfuls of flour, salt and pepper to taste, four quarts of stock. Cut the meat in small pieces. Rub three spoonfuls of the butter on the bottom of a large stewpan. Put in the meat and cook half an hour, stirring frequently. Add the vegetables, spice, a bouquet of sweet herbs and one quart of the stock. Half a can of mushrooms will improve the flavor greatly. Put the remainder of the butter in a frying pan, and when hot, add the flour. Stir until dark brown and as soon as it begins to boil, add to the same. Simmer one hour longer; season with salt and pepper, and strain through a fine sieve or gravy strain- Skim off the fat and the sauce is ready to use. This will keep a week in winter. It is the foundation for all fine dark sauces and will well repay for the trouble of making. er.
This is a classic espagnole-type brown sauce built on a dark roux and a double meat base, scaled for a household that cooked from a stockpot every day. Made in full it yields several quarts; halving or quartering is sensible.
- The roux is the hingeThe flour must be cooked in butter until genuinely dark brown — the colour of an old penny — without scorching. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; a burnt roux turns the whole sauce bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Quantities of stockFour quarts of stock are listed but only one quart is called for by name. The recipe never says where the remaining three quarts go; presumably they are added with the browned roux and over the long simmer. Add them gradually so the sauce stays smooth, and expect substantial reduction.
- Browning the meatThe half hour with the meat in a buttered pan, with no liquid added, is a browning stage rather than a stew, though the text says only to 'cook' and to stir frequently. Use a wide heavy pan and let the meat take real colour.
- Eight tablespoons of butterThat is four ounces, one stick. Three tablespoons go under the meat, the remaining five into the roux with the five tablespoons of flour, which is roughly the correct fat-to-flour ratio.
- MaceA "very small piece" means a fragment of blade mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg. About a quarter teaspoon of ground mace substitutes; it is assertive, so err low.
- Bouquet of sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied together, sometimes with a leek green or a celery stalk. Tie it so it can be lifted out, though here everything is strained anyway.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were a pantry convenience of the period. Four ounces of fresh cremini, browned hard in a little butter and added with the vegetables, gives more flavour.
- Straining and keepingStrain through a fine sieve, pressing lightly, then chill; the fat lifts off as a solid cap. Refrigerated it keeps three or four days; the "week in winter" assumed an unheated pantry. It freezes well in small portions, which is the practical way to use a batch this size.
A dark meat sauce held in reserve as the base for all others is the organising principle of nineteenth-century professional cookery, codified as espagnole in the French kitchen and carried into American household books by way of cooking-school teaching. The two meats are doing different jobs: veal from the lower leg is full of connective tissue and gives the body and gloss, while beef round supplies the deeper savour. Such a sauce was used with venison, hare and wildfowl, which were served with dark sauces rather than pale ones, and a cook who had a jar of this in the cold pantry could finish a dish with wine, currant jelly or mushrooms in minutes. The closing remark that it "will well repay for the trouble of making" is the author conceding, accurately, that this takes time: half an hour with the meat plus an hour's simmer.