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Spanish Sauce for Peppers
A fair substitute for a Spanish sauce may be made of a good beef extract, well seasoned with vegetables. Fry two chopped slices of carrot, one of onion and a bay leaf, a stalk of celery, a sprig of parsley and one of thyme, all chopped together and well mixed. Fry with the vegetables a teaspoonful of ham; stir in a teaspoonful of flour and add gradually a pint of stock; let the sauce simmer slowly for one hour and at the end of that time strain and it is ready to serve around the peppers.
A thin brown sauce built on aromatics and stock, meant to be poured around stuffed peppers rather than over them. The instructions are terse and a few of the quantities need interpreting.
- Beef extract or stock, not bothThe opening sentence offers a shortcut: dissolve a good beef extract (Bovril, Liebig's and their descendants) in water in place of homemade stock. The method that follows then calls for a pint of stock. Use one or the other — a pint of well-made brown stock, or a pint of hot water with about a teaspoon of concentrated beef extract stirred in.
- A pintTwo cups in American measure, 16 fl oz. It will reduce over the hour of slow simmering, so the strained sauce will amount to noticeably less than the pint you started with. The recipe gives no yield or number of peppers.
- "A teaspoonful of ham"Meant as finely minced raw or cured ham, added for savour rather than substance — the same role the ham trimming plays in a classical espagnole. A tablespoon of minced prosciutto or country ham does the job better and will not be missed in the straining.
- The flour is deliberately scantOne teaspoon of flour to a pint of liquid is not a thickening roux; it gives body and a faint gloss, nothing more. The sauce is supposed to stay pourable and settle around the peppers on the platter. Resist the impulse to add more flour.
- Brown the vegetables properly"Fry" here is best read as colouring rather than sweating. Letting the carrot, onion and ham take on brown edges before the flour goes in, and cooking the flour to the colour of light toast, adds colour and depth on top of what the stock or beef extract already contributes.
- Add the stock graduallyWith so little flour there is nothing to hold lumps, but adding the liquid in stages lets the fond dissolve off the pan bottom. Scrape as you go.
- The hour of simmering mattersIt is not for tenderness — the vegetables are strained out and discarded — but for extraction and reduction. Keep it at a bare tremble, uncovered, and skim any fat that rises. Season at the end, since beef extract is already salty and reduction concentrates it.
"Spanish sauce" in Anglo-American cookbooks of this period is almost always sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce of French cookery, whose name is often said to derive from the Spanish court connections of the seventeenth-century French kitchen rather than from anything cooked in Spain, though the story rests on tradition rather than documentary evidence. The classical version demands a long-simmered brown stock, a dark roux and often tomato; what this book offers is frankly labelled a substitute, leaning on the commercial beef extracts that had become a fixture of the late-Victorian pantry after Liebig's meat extract was commercialised in the 1860s. Those bottles let a household cook produce a passable brown sauce in an hour instead of keeping a stockpot going for a day, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s recommend them without embarrassment. The pairing with stuffed peppers may reflect what seems to have been a growing appetite for sweet peppers in American cooking around the turn of the century, as they moved beyond a curiosity of Spanish and Creole cookery.