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Grillon Sauce
Melt two ounces of butter in a stewpan, then rub in a spoonful of flour; stir it about, and add two table-spoonfuls of cream and one of milk. Stir till quite smooth, then add about a table-spoonful of minced parsley and shallot; season with white pepper and salt; keep stirring over the fire until quite hot, but do not let it boil; and serve. It should be of the consistency of thick cream. This sauce is a good accompaniment to fillets of turbot, sole, or whiting. Probable cost, 9d.
A small, rich butter-and-cream sauce of the kind Victorian cooks spooned over poached white fish. The proportions as printed are very short on liquid, so read them with an eye on consistency rather than the letter.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerThe instruction not to let it boil is the whole recipe. With this much butter to so little liquid the emulsion is fragile, and a boil will break it into greasy flour paste. Hold it just hot enough to steam.
- "A spoonful of flour"The amount is unspecified. Against two ounces of butter a tablespoon is the likeliest reading, and a teaspoon would leave the sauce too thin to hold together; note that the recipe writes "table-spoonfuls" explicitly for the cream, so the looser word here may or may not be deliberate.
- Liquid is short as writtenTwo ounces of butter and a tablespoon of flour will absorb far more than three tablespoons of dairy. Expect to add cream or milk by the spoonful until it pours like thick cream, which is the finish the recipe actually asks for.
- Cook the flour firstRub the flour into the butter and stir it over low heat for a minute or two before any dairy goes in. Skipping this leaves a raw, pasty taste that the gentle heating here will never cook out.
- Shallot and parsleyRaw minced shallot stays sharp in a sauce held below boiling. Sweat it in the butter before the flour, then stir the parsley in at the very end so it keeps its colour.
- White pepper for a reasonWhite pepper -- white pepper is called for, most likely so no dark flecks show in a pale sauce over white fish. Black pepper tastes fine but will speck it.
- YieldAbout half a cup as written, more once the liquid is corrected: enough for two to three fillets. It does not reheat well, so make it while the fish is poaching.
- Probable cost, 9d.Cassell's gives a "Probable cost" in pre-decimal pence for most of its recipes, as a household budgeting aid. Ninepence marks this as a modest sauce built from butter, flour and a little dairy.
Cassell's ran to thousands of short entries, and its sauce chapter is essentially a working index of the French repertoire as adapted for English kitchens: a fat, a thickener, a liquid, an aromatic, and a note on what to serve it with. This one is a velout\ a white roux slackened with cream rather than fish stock — finished with a parsley-and-shallot pairing. The name appears to be a house label rather than a dish with a documented origin; nineteenth-century cookery books freely attached proper names to minor sauces, sometimes for a person, sometimes for a restaurant, and often with no surviving explanation.