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Maitre D'Hotel. Sauce
Melt two ounces of fresh butter in a small enamelled saucepan and stir to it, by degrees, two tea-spoonfuls of flour; continue stirring for five or ten minutes, until the butter and flour are well blended, when add, also by degrees, a quarter of a pint of boiling cream and a quarter of a pint of good veal stock, also boiling; add a few spoonfuls of each at a time, and stir well, allowing the sauce to simmer a minute or two between each addition. When perfectly smooth, put in the strained juice of a lemon, or, if preferred, a table-spoonful of chilli vinegar, a little pepper, or cayenne, or a pinch of salt, and a table-spoonful of chopped parsley. The yolks of two eggs are a great improvement to this sauce, and are almost necessary when it is served with fish; but in that case only half the quantity of flour should be used, as the eggs help to thicken. For the plainer way, take half a pint of milk, thicken it with one ounce of butter and a heaped tea-spoonful of flour well worked together, and flavour with lemon-juice, pepper, and salt. Add a table-spoonful of scalded and chopped parsley. The parsley and lemon-juice should be added when the pan is off the fire. Maitre d'Hotel sauce may be simply made thus. Beat till smooth over the fire one ounce of butter, and half an ounce of flour. Add a third of a pint of water, stir and boil, then add two table-spoonfuls of cream or milk. Take the pan off the fire, and add parsley, lemon-juice, pepper, and salt.
Three versions of the same sauce, from a rich velouté-style one bound with egg yolks down to a plain milk sauce. The measurements are imperial, so the liquid quantities are larger than an American cook expects.
- Imperial measuresThe book's pint is 20 fl oz, so a quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (about 2/3 cup) and a third of a pint is roughly 6 1/2 fl oz. The full version therefore makes about 1 1/4 cups of finished sauce.
- The enamelled panSpecified because bare iron or unlined copper discolours a sauce containing lemon juice and turns it metallic. Stainless steel or an enamelled pan does the same job now.
- Cook the roux, don't colour itThe five to ten minutes of stirring is to cook out the raw flour taste while keeping the roux blond. Keep the heat low.
- Egg yolks are the hingeWhere yolks are used, temper them: whisk a ladle of the hot sauce into the beaten yolks, return the mixture to the pan off direct heat, and bring it back only to a bare steam. Boiling after the yolks go in will curdle it.
- Parsley and lemon lastThe instruction to add them off the fire is worth following in all three versions. Heat dulls the lemon and turns chopped parsley from green to olive-brown within a minute or two.
- Chilli vinegarA Victorian storecupboard staple: vinegar steeped with dried red chillies. A teaspoon of a plain hot pepper vinegar, or cider vinegar with a pinch of cayenne, stands in for the tablespoon called for.
- Veal stockA pale, gelatinous, barely seasoned stock, not the dark reduced kind. Unsalted chicken stock is the nearest thing most kitchens keep, and it suits the fish and poultry this sauce is meant for.
- Scalded parsleyIn the plain version the parsley is dropped into boiling water for a few seconds and drained before chopping. It sets the colour and takes the raw edge off; it is optional but not pointless.
Maître d'hôtel means the head of the household staff, and in French cooking the term attached to the simplest of the flavourings a steward might be expected to produce at short notice: butter worked with parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. That compound butter, beurre maître d'hôtel, is generally taken to be the parent form, and it is still what a chef means by the name today; the sauce in Cassell's is that same seasoning carried in a flour-thickened base so it can be poured over fish or boiled poultry rather than melted on a grilled chop. The three graded versions here are typical of the dictionary's method, offering a household a rich form with cream, veal stock and yolks, a plainer one on milk, and a bare one on water, all under a single name. That the water-and-milk version was thought worth printing says a good deal about late-Victorian kitchens, where cream and good stock were not daily assumptions.