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Allemand Sauce
Put into a saucepan one pint of chicken stock, with a little salt, six mushrooms, a thin strip of lemon-peel, and a little parsley. Let it boil, then draw it to the side of the fire, and allow it to simmer slowly for half an hour or more. Thicken it with a little flour, let it boil for a few minutes, and strain. Add the beaten yolks of three eggs, and replace it on the fire. Stir it constantly, and make it thoroughly hot; but it must not boil up again, or the sauce will be spoiled. When off the fire, stir a little butter into it, and the juice of half a lemon. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for a pint of sauce.
A velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Everything depends on the last stage: once the yolks go in, the sauce must be brought hot but never to a boil.
- The hinge — no boiling after the yolksEgg yolks in stock set at roughly 180F/82C, and a boil will scramble them into grains no amount of whisking recovers. Temper the beaten yolks with a ladle of the hot strained sauce first, return the lot to low heat, and stir until it coats the back of a spoon.
- Imperial pintCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups of chicken stock. The finished yield is stated as a pint.
- Thickening"A little flour" is unhelpfully vague; for a pint of liquid use about 1 oz (roughly 3 1/2 tablespoons) flour, worked into an equal weight of soft butter as beurre manié and whisked in in pieces. Simmer three or four minutes to cook out the raw starch before straining.
- StockPeriod chicken stock was strong and gelatinous, made from whole birds and feet. Commercial broth is thinner; reduce it by a third before starting, and hold back the added salt until the end.
- Mushrooms and peelFor six mushrooms, figure on 3 to 4 oz of chestnut or white mushrooms, halved. Use only the yellow zest in the strip of peel; the white pith turns the sauce bitter over a half-hour simmer.
- Draw it to the side of the fireOn a range this meant a gentle, barely trembling simmer at the cooler edge of the plate. Lowest gas or an induction setting around 190F does the same thing.
- FinishingThe butter and lemon juice go in off the heat, whisked in cold and in small pieces, which both enriches the sauce and stops the yolks cooking further. Add the lemon last and taste — a pint takes less juice than half a lemon usually gives.
- Holding and reheatingAn egg-thickened sauce will not hold on direct heat. Keep it in a bowl over warm (not simmering) water for up to an hour, with a film of butter on the surface to stop a skin forming; it does not reheat well the next day.
Sauce allemande was one of the grand sauces of early nineteenth-century French practice — a velouté enriched with an egg-yolk liaison and sharpened with lemon — and the name is generally explained by its pale, blond colour set against the brown sauces beside it, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. Escoffier later treated it as a derivative of velouté rather than a mother sauce, and it is sometimes said to have been met under the alternative name sauce parisienne during the First World War. A late-Victorian English kitchen with pretensions to French cookery was expected to have a handful of these base sauces in hand, ready to be poured over boiled fowl, sweetbreads, veal or poached eggs, and the recipe's careful warning about not letting it boil is the sort of instruction that separated a trained cook from a plain one.