Culinary jottings

Espagnole sauce, therefore, is simply a good, rich, brown, meat gravy, thickened with flour. It only possesses the flavour derived from the vegetables, and from the ordinary meat that you have employed to make it. Using this sauce as your medium or basis, you can proceed to compose a number of rich preparations as follows : — Financiere, Perigueux, Bordelaise, Provengale, Genevoise, Matelote, Chateaubriand, Begence, Italienne, and Reforme, with others too numerous to mention. The specialites of the sauces, I have enumerated, consist in the distinct flavouring of the Espagnole, from which they are really made, with mushrooms, truffles, essence of game or of pigeons, poultry, fish, or ham (concerning which I shall speak later on), wine in judicious proportions, delicate vegetables, and so on. A careful perusal of the receipts given, hereafter in my menus, ought to guide you, when once you have achieved an undeniable foundation with your Espagnole. Game fragments, poultry, mushrooms, &c., must, on no account, be used in making Espagnole, for such ingredients would impart a distinct flavour to the sauce. The object, remember, is to reserve the flavouring according to the particular sauce we may select. I will, for example, give you saiice a la Perigueux : — Chop up half the contents of a small bottle of truffles, and toss them awhile in some melted butter at the bottom of a light sauce-pan, add a coffee-cupful of clear gravy, and a glass of Madeira, and simmer for ten minutes ; give it a little pepper, a pinch of sugar, and salt, and then slowly stir in half a pint of Espagnole to complete the sauce, and when thoroughly hot, it is ready. Take now Financiere sauce for, let us say, a ragout of that name : — Choose a nice tender fowl, lightly roast it, and save the choicest fillet meat for your ragout : take the legs, thighs, skin, bones, liver, giblets, scraps, and trimmings, and proceed to make an essence of them thus : — Break up the bones, and, with the remnants aforesaid, make the strongest broth you can, flavoured with an onion, a bit of celery, a spoonful of dried herbs, a sliced carrot, and two or three pepper corns. Reduce it as strong as possible, and then strain. Now, take equal portions of mushrooms and of truffles ; cut them up, and toss them in melted butter at the bottom of a sauce-pan, and when you have worked them well thus, for two or three minutes, add your fowl essence, with a glass of sherry, and complete the sauce with your pint of Espagnole. The ragout (which should be garnished with whole button mushrooms, sliced truffles, cocks-combs, sweet-breads, tongue, grated ham, and sippets of crisply fried bacon) is merely a careful stew of fowl fillets, in the sauce I have described. As the fillets have been previously cooked, they will merely require gently heating up in the sauce. It will be observed that the specialties of the two sauces just given are a flavour of truffles and Madeira in Perigueux, and of chicken essence with mushrooms, truffles, and sherry in Financiere.