Espagnole sauce is a basic brown sauce, and is one of the mother sauces of classic French cooking. In the early 19th century the chef Antonin Carême included it in his list of the basic sauces of French cooking. In the early 20th century Auguste Escoffier named it as one of the five sauces at the core of France's cuisine.

Etymology

"Espagnole" is the French for "Spanish". Many French sauces have names of countries, such as hollandaise sauce or crème anglaise. Generally, the country's name is chosen as a tribute to a historical event or because the sauce's content evokes that country. In the case of Spanish sauce, it is thought that the name was given due to its red color, which is associated with Spain. Subsequently, several attempts were created to explain its name. It is said, for example, that Anne of Austria – who despite her name was Spanish – introduced cooks from Spain to the kitchens of the French court and that her cooks improved the French brown sauce by adding tomatoes. A similar tale refers to the Spanish cooks employed by Louis XIV's wife, Maria Theresa of Spain. There is no record of Spanish cooks in the kitchens of the French court, therefore, these explanations appear to be baseless. Another suggestion is that in the 17th century, Spanish bacon and ham were introduced as the meat for the stock on which the sauce is based, rather than the traditional beef.

History

The term "sauce espagnole" appears in Vincent La Chapelle's 1733 cookery book Le Cuisinier moderne, but no recipe is given. Antonin Carême printed a detailed recipe in his 1828 book Le Cuisinier parisien. By the middle of the 19th century the sauce was familiar in the English-speaking world: in her Modern Cookery of 1845 Eliza Acton gave two recipes for it, one with added wine and one without. The sauce was included in Auguste Escoffier's 1903 classification of the five mother sauces, on which much French cooking depends.

Ingredients

The recipe given by Carême runs to more than 400 words. He calls for ham, veal, and partridges in the cooking pan, gently braised in water for two hours, after which roux is mixed in and the pan is returned to the stove for a further two hours or more. It is garnished with "parsley, chives, bay leaves, thyme, sweet basil and cloves and parings of mushrooms". Carême is credited with codifying the key sauces—the mother sauces, or in his phrase, the grandes sauces—on which classic French haute cuisine is based. His recipes for velouté, béchamel, allemande, as well as espagnole became standard for French chefs of his day. Nearly a century after Carême, Auguste Escoffier followed the former's classification of the key sauces, though adding mayonnaise and tomato sauces to the list and removing allemande. His recipe for espagnole, dating from 1903, is briefer than his predecessor's. It calls for brown stock (made from veal, beef and bacon), a brown roux, diced bacon fat, diced carrot, thyme, bay, parsley and butter, simmered for three hours. Tomato purée is added to the other ingredients in some more recent recipes, including in the catering textbook Practical Cookery by Victor Ceserani and Ronald Kinton.

Derivatives

Sauce espagnole is the basis for many French sauces. They include:

Sources