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Sauce of Many Names
A sauce that goes by the name of the flavoring added, as caper, mushroom, chopped cucumber, hard-boiled eggs, and various herbs, is made by mixing together two large tablespoonfuls of butter and a tablespoonful of flour; put into a sauce-pan, and add two cups of broth or water; set on the fire, and when thick add of the articles mentioned to suit the taste; salt; take from the fire, add the yolk of an egg, beaten, and serve. Thus you have cucumber, egg, herb, or mushroom sauce.
This is a single working formula — a roux, a thin broth, a flavoring, an egg-yolk liaison — presented as the parent of half a dozen named sauces. The proportions are sound; the only fragile step is the yolk.
- The hinge: the yolkOnce the beaten yolk goes in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into scrambled egg. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolk with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce first, then stir it back in and serve within a minute or two.
- MeasurementsTwo large tablespoonfuls of butter is about 1 oz (30 g); a tablespoon of flour to an ounce of butter is a slightly fat roux, which is what carries the yolk. Two cups of liquid to that much roux gives a pouring sauce, not a coating one — reduce to a cup and a half if you want it thicker.
- "Sauce-pan" and methodThe book has you combine butter and flour cold, then add liquid and heat. That works, but cooking the roux for a minute over low heat first removes the raw-flour taste the original does not mention.
- Broth or waterBroth is not optional in practice — with water this is a thin white sauce with almost nothing to say. Use chicken or veal stock for poultry and eggs, fish stock for fish, and salt at the end, after the stock has concentrated.
- Capers and mushroomsCapers should be drained and rinsed of brine, and added off the heat so they stay firm. Mushrooms need to be cooked separately in butter until their water has gone before they join the sauce, or they will dilute it.
- Cucumber and herbsPeel, seed and dice the cucumber, salt it briefly and pat dry; raw cucumber releases a surprising amount of water. Delicate herbs — parsley, chervil, tarragon, dill — go in at the very end, with the yolk.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to sauce four to six servings of poached fish, boiled fowl or plain vegetables. It does not reheat well; make it to order.
What this entry describes, without naming it, is close to the French sauce system: a white roux loosened with stock (a velouté), finished with an egg yolk — a liaison that in French practice would push it nearer to an allemande — and then renamed according to whatever is stirred in at the last moment. French practice organised sauces into a small number of parent preparations with many named derivatives, and household books of this kind often compressed that scheme into a single paragraph: the useful arithmetic of it, stripped of the vocabulary. The framing suits domestic writing preoccupied with teaching one method that would serve many dishes rather than a long list of separate receipts. It also assumes a household with broth on hand.