Café de Paris Sauce: the history, a recipe and where to go to eat it

The death of classic sauces, although announced, has never happened. Fortunately. Those famous mother sauces, compiled first by Carême and then Escoffier, were endangered by Paul Bocuse and

nouvelle cuisine.

and his defense because the raw material expressed itself. Along with them, ours, the most traditional, have been on the ropes in the hardest years of the

healthy

movement , but a couple of spoonfuls of linked glory are something very difficult to reject. We like a sauce on the plate, what are we going to do with it, especially if it makes it grow and is not there to play at hiding the defects of whatever it embraces, even if the latter is part of its DNA.

Some have made a strong comeback, propitiated, perhaps, by the splendor that aristocratic dishes such as Rossini sirloin, Wellington, hare a la Royale or pieces with their juices a la

presse

are experiencing at the same time . It may also be because, simply, poorly understood gastronomic fusions have ended up exhausting our palates. It is increasingly common to find a

Perigourdine

sauce , a champagne sauce or a

beurre blanc

on the menus, while on the other hand chefs continue working on updating and lightening them by removing considerable percentages of fats and flour without leaving them orphaned.

In this return from the sauce boat to the table, there has been no shortage of Café de Paris, a sauce with a creamy texture, spicy and herbal notes, with the umami provided by anchovies and Worcestershire, the sweet touch of ketchup – yes, ketchup – and the liqueurs, which hide a slight spicy touch. It can be addictive, especially if you get the quantities of its endless list of dressings right and work well before serving it. It is always a good company, especially for a beef entrecote, although curiously, in recent years it has appeared alongside fish and vegetables and not always in posh restaurants, this made easier because some brands such as the European Gautschi and Gourmet Berner or the Catalan Food&Magic have started to market it. It is versatile, so for those who love dairy products, Café de Paris sauce will serve as gastronomic nirvana.

One about sauce and one about marketing

France is made of butter; If there is an ingredient that is automatically associated with the French country, it is this. Therefore, when Café de Paris sauce is mentioned, two things come to mind: first, that, obviously, the recipe includes a good portion of butter; the second, which is a sauce of French origin. Only in the latter would we miss the mark.

The detour would only be a few degrees because it was in Geneva, a city located on the Swiss border with France, very close to Lyon and its

culinary

mères

, where it is said that he was born in 1930. The address is also very specific: that of the Coq D'Or restaurant owned by the Boubier couple, who is credited with authoring the sauce, which is still a compound butter (that is, seasoned) later diluted in cream. The number of ingredients that make it up exceeds twenty, even thirty in some cases. Yes, which ones? Although there have been many approaches, the original formula is unknown.

The marriage was clever and never shared the recipe. He inherited it from her daughter, married to an innkeeper, Monsieur Dumont, who was also clever and kept it in a safe. He would take it out to serve it along with an entrecôte in his own Geneva restaurant: Le Café de Paris, which eventually gave the recipe its name. Such was the success that the restaurant ended up eliminating the rest of the dishes from its menu. It became the key to its business and continues to do so today, when decades and partners are in between, the brand has more than fifteen restaurants in Switzerland, France, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Spain, where Madrid already has three of they.

Rosa Tovar, chef and gastronomic historian, is not convinced by this issue of secrecy. “Talking about secret formulas in cooking is absurd and in this case it seems more commercial to me than anything else. They are an ancient invention, they already appear in texts from the 13th century and there are no unique sauces. I haven't studied it in depth, but it's probably an adaptation of something else that, of course, they didn't create." Travel has always been part of the recipe books. For some decades now, so has marketing.

Not only with entrecôte

Stepping into Switzerland and not having its Café de Paris entrecôte is like being in Spain and not trying the potato omelette. It is one of those national emblems with which you can achieve gastronomic glory if you get it right, of course, with the place to put it in your mouth. We already know that eating when traveling also requires training and that our destination can be a real gastronomic minefield.

As in Spain, the prestigious Gault-Millau guide – which was born as a response to Michelin in the 70s – stated in 2020 that the old Café de Paris

entrecôte

was once again in great demand in Switzerland. The Catalan chef Zineb Hattab, who runs her own restaurant in Zurich, Kler, tells us that there “many dishes are accompanied by compound butters that may be similar, but the Café de Paris sauce as such is something more emblematic that is maintained in places iconic dishes that serve entrecôte. It is something that attracts tourists, especially in mountain sites. Yes, there are more modern sites that serve it in revised versions.” She, for example, does not use it: “It is very tasty, but it is very

heavy

,” she admits. In Madrid, the Café de Paris restaurants – L'Entrecot – are responsible for perpetuating the legend of the Swiss dish, but there are other addresses that have seen the possibilities of the sauce.

César Martín from Lakasa in Madrid, is one of those chefs who have dissociated it from meat to bathe his

bouchot

mussels with it , which are one of his big hits when the Breton mollusk season begins. “The mussel is pure fiber so it seemed appropriate to put a fatty sauce on it. What can be fattier than butter? In addition, the shell perfectly collects the sauce so that the bite is very tasty. Well, that's where it all started about eight years ago."

He and his team have their own version of 26 ingredients that they developed based on the flavor and texture they needed. “We don't look at a specific recipe,” they say. The basics are there: the butter, the anchovies, the Worcestershire, the cognac, the wine, the garlic, the cayenne, the variety of herbs and spices. Furthermore, they have no problem sharing it: “It seems absurd to me nowadays to want to hide preparations or ingredients. It is much more rewarding to share your path with others, it makes us all better.”

In his book

Flavors

, Lord Ottolenghi has also decontextualized the sauce and uses it to accompany celeriac that he presents on oven-roasted fillets. He limits the recipe to 14 ingredients and assures that it does not matter that the sauce is cut, that is, that the fat begins to separate as if it were not the issue. The truth is that the presentation loses points and that the mere fact of seeing it swarming around the plate does not help (even if it is delicious).

An approach to the recipe

It is difficult to find this sauce in recipe books. One of the latest published recipe books that include it is

¡Salsa!

by chef Romain Fornell. In his version, the number of ingredients is considerably reduced to eleven. The Worcestershire, ketchup and a good number of herbs and spices disappear. The most notable thing, too, is that it is prepared with chicken livers instead of anchovies as flavor enhancers. Also, I directly recommend using it to accompany hamburgers.

But let's go further back. One of the first references to the recipe for this sauce is found in

The Modern Culinary Art

of the French chef Henri-Paul Pellaprat, co-founder of the Cordon Bleu school. The first edition of this title was published in 1936, a year very close to the creation of the recipe according to the Café de Paris restaurants, hence it is the best approximation to the original recipe. It consists of 24 ingredients. Adaptations are welcome: the kitchen is free and the sauce, joy!

Ingredients

for the butter

• 1 kg of butter

• 60 g ketchup

• 25 g mustard

• 25 g capers

• 125 g shallots

• 50 g parsley

• 5 g marjoram

• 5 g dill

• 5g thyme

• 10 tarragon leaves

• A pinch of rosemary

• 1 clove garlic

• 8 anchovy fillets

• 1 tablespoon cognac

• 1 tablespoon of aromatic wine*

• Half a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce

• 1 tablespoon paprika

• Half a tablespoon of curry

• 1 pinch of cayenne

• 8 g pepper

• The juice of 1 lemon

• 1/2 lemon peel

• ¼ orange peel

• 12g salt

For the sauce

• 125 g of the compound butter

• 1.25 l fresh cream or cream

• 10 g of butter worked with flour

Instructions

1.

Put all the ingredients, except the butter, in a terrine. Cover it for 24 hours to let it ferment a little. 

2.

Pass everything through the blender until you obtain a fine and homogeneous puree.

3.

Separately, work the butter until it looks like an ointment. Add the puree and mix well. Store this butter covered and in a cool place: it will keep for several weeks. 

4.

Slightly heat the cream in a frying pan.

5.

Add the compound butter and the one worked with flour. 

6.

Heat over low heat until the binding is complete.

*The Spanish translation of the book says “Wooden Wine.” Everything leads to think that it refers to Madeira wine, since in French it is

vin de Madère

. Furthermore, as Cristina Silva from Vinotellers tells us, “normally when the French talk about a

vin madérisé

they refer to a wine with a certain oxidation. As they become a color similar to that of Madeira wines, in France the word Madeira has ended up being borrowed and converted into “

maderisé

”. She recommends replacing it with an Oloroso or an Amontillado “if we want to bring it to our territory.”