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Brown Sauce (Melt one tablespoonful)
Melt one tablespoonful of butter, stir until brown, thicken with a little flour, add a half pint of stock; let boil; season with salt and pepper, half teaspoonful of onion juice, one tablespoonful of Worcestershire sauce, and the juice of one lemon; may be served with a fricandeau and garnished with currant jelly.
A small brown sauce built on a quick browned-butter roux rather than a long-simmered espagnole. It comes together in under ten minutes and is meant to be spooned over game or a larded veal fricandeau.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint is one cup of stock. One tablespoon of butter with "a little flour" means roughly a tablespoon of flour, which gives a light, pourable sauce rather than a coating one; use a scant tablespoon more if you want body.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce four servings.
- The hingeThe butter must brown but not blacken. Cook it over moderate heat until the milk solids turn hazelnut brown and it smells nutty, then add the flour immediately. Butter goes from brown to burnt in seconds and a scorched roux will taint the whole cup of sauce.
- StockA brown veal or game stock suits it; a good beef or dark chicken stock works too. If using commercial stock, hold back the salt until the end, since the Worcestershire also adds sodium.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate directly into the sauce. A few strokes of a small onion should give about the half teaspoon called for.
- Lemon and WorcestershireBoth go in off the heat or at the very end of the boil. Boiling drives off the volatile aromatics in Worcestershire and turns the lemon flat and slightly bitter.
- FricandeauA larded, braised cut of veal from the top round, glazed in its own reduced braising liquid. It has largely disappeared from home cooking; the sauce is equally at home with venison, hare or roast game birds.
- The currant jelly garnishNot decoration only. Red currant jelly was a customary accompaniment to game, the sweet-tart note doing what a fruit reduction does in a modern kitchen.
Brown sauce in an American household book of this period is a domesticated descendant of the French sauce espagnole, which in a professional kitchen meant brown stock thickened with a dark roux and simmered for hours with mirepoix and tomato. What survives here is the shape of the thing, compressed into a single pan and finished with bottled Worcestershire, widely sold in America by this date, which did some of the aromatic work that a long reduction once did. Strongly flavoured meats such as venison, hare and wildfowl were conventionally served with a dark, sharp sauce and a sweet accompaniment, currant jelly being the usual one, an English habit that carried over to American tables. The fricandeau mentioned at the end was a fashionable veal dish of the late nineteenth century and appears in general cookbooks of the era, though it has largely dropped out of use since.