Sauce Madere is a spectacular savory sauce to accompany your finest beef. This recipe is kin to and the base for the even more decadent black truffle infused Sauce Perigueux.
The recipe comes from the incredible Escoffier Cookbook, but the recipe there is very confusing. This is because M. Escoffier works backwards from the finished sauce to the base ingredients (make the Sauce Madere from veal stock and half-glaze; make the half glaze from Brown Stock and Sauce Espagnole; make the Sauce Espagnole from Brown Roux, Brown Stock, and Mirepoix...) All of those recipes are written for different volumes of resulting sauce, so there's quite a lot of math involved.
Fortunately for those of us in the Plymouth area, Erik Piantedosi at Piantedosi Butcher Shop in North Plymouth saves us most of the hard work by selling the demi-glace in frozen 14-oz containers! That excellent product brings this delicious sauce into reach for regular cooking.