French term (edited): jus corsé perlé

To start with, you're really parsing it wrongly; the adjectives 'corsé' and 'perlé' both qualify 'jus', and so it's more helpful to keep them together.

Although the term 'jus' is quite commonly used these days even in EN (and especially when being pretentious!), there is also something of an 'inverted snobbery backlash' which would give us back the perfectly satisfactory EN word 'gravy'.

'corsé' usually means it is heavily-reduced, and therefore the flavour has become more concentrated; so to me 'rich' conveys this perfectly well; hard to suggest anything much else, unless of course one knew the actual ingredients involved.

'perlé' has I think come up before here and ought to be in the glossary. The answer I got from a number of different French chefs was that it refers to the tiny round 'pearls' (?) of fat that float in a water-based jus if you choose not to emulsion it; my Mum always used to make her gravy like this (I'm sure it was by accident), but now it deserves a posh FR word for it!

I'm not convinced that it will be elegantly helpful to try and render this in EN — however I try to do it, it always sounds clunky and unappetising; I think, since it isn't going to make a huge difference to the flavour of the dish, this is one of those cases where it is best left out — like so much of the flowery descriptions you get in FR menus.

I'm absolutely sure it has nothing to do with either pearl barley or meatballs!

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Note added at 4 days (2013-04-15 20:04:57 GMT)
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Here is one of the few pictures I was actually able to find that shows it clearly enough:

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/aa/fb/00/c...