From:
The Thorough Good Cook
Sauces: 47. Poor Man's Sauce
Put a dessertspoonful of chopped
shallots into half a
gill of
vinegar with a blade of
mace, a
clove, fifteen or twenty
peppercorns, a small piece of
ham, a small piece of
bay-leaf, a sprig of
thyme, and a little
parsley; reduce this three-fourths; add two ragout-spoonfuls of
spanish sauce, and one of
consommé; stir it on the fire till boiling, and draw it to the corner of the stove to imbibe flavour. Skim it, and pass it through a
colander spoon. This sauce should be kept very
thin.
Noder's note: It would be interesting to
research the origin of the name for this sauce. One could assume that the name is fairly
literal. The sparing use of
spices (only one clove and one blade of mace, the liberal use of relatively "cheap" pappercorns) would seem to indiciate that this would have been a rather affordable sauce to produce in 1896, The
gravy in the spanish sauce, and the consomme could easily be produced from left over ingredients. It is, overall, a sauce that derives its flavor more from the effort put into it than from the use of
exotic/
expensive ingredients.