Reducing Broth for Sauces

Until relatively recently, meat sauces were thickened with flour, which was usually cooked in butter to form a roux before broth was added. Typically, these sauces—called veloutés when made with white broth, espagnole when made with brown—were then carefully reduced to rid them of fat and any starchy taste from the flour, and to concentrate their flavor. This System worked fine when broths were made with large quantities of meat and were intensely flavorful to begin with. But meat has become too expensive, and our social System is no longer designed in such a way that the boiled meat can be given to the servants while the broth is used in the sauces. Nowadays the basic broths, or stocks, used for making the classic sauces are made almost entirely with bones. But a bone broth thickened with flour has very little to offer.