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French White Sauce
Put a piece of butter the size of a walnut into a saucepan. with two table- [147] spoonfuls of flour; cook slowly, but do not let it brown. Stir constantly and add a very little water, salt and pepper to taste. When it has thickened remove from the fire and stir in the yolk of an egg well beaten, three table-- spoonfuls of cream and a few drops of vinegar, which have been thoroughly mixed together.
A roux thickened with water and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison — in French terms a small velouté taken toward sauce allemande. The instructions are terse about quantities, so the notes below fill in what a period cook would have taken for granted.
- Butter the size of a walnutRoughly 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons, though period usage of the phrase varies. That is about equal to the 2 tablespoons of flour by volume (the flour weighs rather less), a proportion that gives a sauce of pouring consistency once enough liquid is added.
- "A very little water" is misleading"A very little water" -- Two tablespoons of flour will thicken about a cup of liquid. Add it a little at a time, as written; if you want a pouring sauce rather than a paste it will take rather more than "a very little," bearing in mind that the 3 tablespoons of cream added at the end also thin it.
- Do not let it brownCook the flour over low heat for two or three minutes only, to take off the raw taste while keeping the roux pale. Any colour taken in the pan will tint the finished sauce.
- Temper the yolkBeat the yolk, cream and vinegar together as directed, then stir a ladle of the hot sauce into that mixture before returning the whole to the pan. Adding cold egg straight into hot sauce is the usual cause of scrambling.
- Finishing heatOff the fire, residual heat alone may not carry the yolk far enough to set or to be safe. Return the pan to very low heat and stir until the sauce coats a spoon, around 180F, and stop there — at a boil the yolk curdles and the sauce breaks.
- The vinegarA few drops means exactly that: enough sharpness to lift the cream, not enough to taste of vinegar. Cider or white wine vinegar will do; lemon juice is the usual modern substitution and behaves much the same way.
- YieldAbout a cup. It does not reheat well once the yolk is in, so make it last.
A sauce like this sits at the base of the nineteenth-century French repertoire that American cookbooks were busy absorbing: a pale roux, a light liquid, then a liaison of egg yolk and cream sharpened with acid, the same construction as the classical sauce allemande, though allemande proper is built on stock rather than water. The vagueness about liquid quantity is typical of the period; cookbooks of this kind were written for cooks who already knew what a sauce should look like on the spoon and needed only the order of operations.