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Chicken, White Sauce for Boiled
Dissolve an ounce of butter in a small saucepan, and mix smoothly with it three-quarters of an ounce of flour. Stir in half a pint of white stock, or water, and add a small carrot, three button mushrooms, and an ounce of lean ham. Stir the sauce till it boils, draw it back and let it simmer for twenty minutes. Skim and strain it, then boil it again, and put a quarter of a pint of cream with it. Sufficient for two small chickens.
A blond roux velouté, flavoured by infusion rather than by long reduction. The aromatics go in raw and come out at the strainer, so the whole thing is done in half an hour.
- Imperial measuresCassell's is a British book using the 20-ounce pint: half a pint of stock is about 1¼ US cups, a quarter pint of cream is a generous ½ cup. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; three-quarters of an ounce of flour is about 3 tablespoons.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock from veal knuckle or chicken, simmered without roasted bones or caramelised vegetables, so the finished sauce stays pale. A light unsalted chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; water, the book's fallback, gives a sauce that leans entirely on the ham and mushrooms.
- Keep the roux paleThe butter and flour should cook only until they smell faintly of biscuit, with no colour at all. Any browning shows in the finished sauce, and the point of a white sauce for boiled chicken is that it looks like the chicken.
- Button mushroomsIn Victorian usage these are small white cultivated mushrooms, valued here for perfume rather than substance. They are strained out, so trimmings and stalks do the job as well as whole caps.
- The hamA lean piece of cured, unsmoked ham, cut in a single chunk so it can be lifted out. Heavily smoked ham or bacon will dominate; taste before you salt, since the ham and stock between them may be enough.
- Simmer, then strain, then finishTwenty minutes at a bare simmer is an infusion, not a reduction — keep it low or the sauce thickens past pouring consistency. Strain, return to the boil, then add the cream and let it come back to a simmer only briefly; a hard boil after the cream goes in risks the sauce breaking or catching.
- Yield"Sufficient for two small chickens" comes to roughly 1½ cups of sauce, enough for six to eight servings poured over or around boiled fowl. It thickens on standing; loosen with a spoonful of stock or cream when reheating.
This is the standard nineteenth-century English sauce for a boiled fowl, and it is essentially a velouté built the French way — white roux, white stock, an infusion of ham and mushroom, cream at the end. Boiling was often said to be the respectable treatment for a young chicken in Victorian households, since it produced pale, mild meat and a broth that could be used elsewhere, but it left the bird needing all its flavour from outside; the sauce, not the fowl, carried the dish. Cassell's gives it as an alphabetical dictionary entry, headed "Chicken, White Sauce for Boiled" — and a cook who could make this could make a dozen related sauces by changing one element: adding egg yolk instead of cream turns it toward a sauce allemande.