The spirit of cookery

From this general aspic a few simple sauces are derived, namely, clear tarragon sauce and plain aspic sauce. All sauces except Dutch sauce having broth as the essential basis of their savour, and such broth not differing from the standards which we have laid down in connection with soups, it is not necessary to describe the mode of preparing the broth for sauces again in this place. Let the cook bear in mind that the flavours must be adapted to each grand sauce ; the brown or espagnole bears the strongest flavours and admixture; velouté, béchamel, allemande, and butter sauce require to be mildly flavoured and spiced. If these general conditions are remembered, the principles of the preparation of the sauces and their derivates will be easily understood and applied. In what is called the bourgeois kitchen, or, rather, in the recipes written for the use of such, the rule that a sauce must be savoury with meat-extract is strangely forgotten ; also the necessity of transforming flour into dextrine is not insisted upon, or the process is so imperfectly defined that it is only partially attained. More commonly a thickening with mere flour is obtained, as in the liaison above stated after Gouffe ; this imparts a crude paste taste, the taste which characterizes badly-made so-called melted butter, being a gruel with a little butter stirred into it. We have studied many cookery-books in this particular respect, and have found most of them lamentably deficient owing to the want of the proper theoretical appreciation of the processes in question. The next essential part of the preparation of savoury sauces consists in the boiling down of all the extracts, including the aspic added to a glace. This produces, as we know from the consommes in the last stage, the caramels of osmazome, which are the most savoury substances attainable. This was so well known to the master cooks of the last century that they termed such condensed coulis caramels directly, without qualification or adjective. The brown coulis are only fit for brown sauce, hence brown sauce is that which can be made the most tasty of all sauces ; but for white and bland sauces the coulis must be kept as pale as possible; evaporation, therefore, must not be carried to the point of caramelization ; just as the roux has been kept white, so the coulis must be kept white. BROWN OR ESPAGNOLE SAUCE This evaporation to glace diminishes the flavours somewhat, but tones the strong ones down more than the others, and thus harmonizes the whole of them ; where needed, the flavour is re-established by secondary operations, travails, and specific additions.* Brown Sauce, or Espagnole. We will now work out the details of the production of the standard sauces as examples and illustrations of principles, beginning with espagnole.