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Allemande Sauce
Put one ounce of butter into a pan. Stir into it one ounce of flour, add to it half a pint of white stock or broth. Stir constantly and as soon as it boils remove from the fire; stir into it the yolks of four eggs well beaten; use great care or the hot liquid will cook the eggs. Season with salt and pepper to suit the taste. Return the pan to the fire, stirring constantly and allowing the mixture to reach boiling point, when it must be removed at once, as if allowed to boil the eggs will curdle. Add a piece of butter the size of an egg.
A velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, and the whole thing turns on keeping the yolks below a hard boil. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hingeOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must never actually boil. Bring it just to the point where the surface shivers and a wisp of steam rises, then pull it off the heat; a true rolling boil scrambles the yolks into grains that no whisking will smooth out.
- TemperingThe recipe takes the pan off the fire before the yolks go in. Whisking a ladleful of the hot velouté into the beaten yolks first, then returning that mixture to the pan, is a safer way of doing the same thing, though the text does not say so.
- MeasurementsHalf a pint is one cup (8 fl oz). One ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; one ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup. "A piece of butter the size of an egg" is about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than roasted, so the finished sauce stays pale. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour the sauce is named for.
- Four yolks to one cupThat is a very rich liaison by current standards and will give a sauce thick enough to coat heavily. Two or three yolks give a lighter result, closer to the proportions in modern published versions.
- Cook the flourThe recipe does not say so, but stir the butter and flour together over low heat for two or three minutes before the stock goes in. Otherwise the raw starch taste carries through a sauce that has almost no other seasoning to hide it.
- Finishing and holdingStrain through a fine sieve after the yolks, then beat in the final butter off the heat so it emulsifies rather than melts to oil. A squeeze of lemon is traditional and sharpens it. Hold over warm, not simmering, water and use within the hour; it will not reheat.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four to six servings of poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads or eggs.
Allemande simply means "German," and the name has puzzled cooks for two centuries, since the sauce is thoroughly French in construction. It reached its settled form in the early nineteenth century, when Antonin Carême set out his system of mother sauces and placed allemande among them: a velouté enriched with a liaison of egg yolks, sometimes cream, and finished with butter and lemon. Escoffier later demoted it, treating it as a derivative of velouté rather than a foundation in its own right, but by then it had been copied into English-language household manuals, which is how a Parisian restaurant sauce comes to sit in a book aimed at ordinary kitchens. The version here is stripped down — no cream, no mushroom essence, no reduction — but the technique it teaches, thickening with yolks without letting them curdle, was the point of including it.