Home › The Principles of Cookery › Poulette Sauce
Poulette Sauce
Take three ounces of fresh butter; cut from it a little piece the size of a nut, and melt the rest in a stewpan. Mix three ounces of flour smoothly with it, and stir the paste over the fire for three minutes, then add gradually a pint of boiling stock. Stir the sauce over the fire for a quarter of an hour. Draw it away for a minute that it may cool slightly, and mix with it the yolks of two eggs which have been beaten up with two table-spoonfuls of thick cream. Simmer the sauce again until it begins to thicken, but it must not boil. Add to it a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, a little pepper and salt, and a dozen button mushrooms, and pour it into the tureen. Just before sending to table stir into it the little piece of butter which was reserved; then serve immediately. To prepare the mushrooms, remove the stalks and peel them. Put them into a stewpan with a table-spoonful of lemon-juice and a table-spoonful of water. Shake them over the fire for a minute or two till they have absorbed the juice. Put an ounce of butter with them, and boil over a quick fire for five minutes. Turn them into a basin, cover them over, and they are ready for the sauce. Time, altogether, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A classic velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The one thing that will ruin it is heat: once the yolks go in, the sauce must never reach a boil or it will curdle into a grainy scramble.
- The liaison is the hingeDraw the pan off the heat, temper the beaten yolks and cream with a ladleful of the hot sauce, then return everything to a very low flame. Hold it just below a simmer, stirring, until it coats the spoon — around 175-180F. Above about 185F the yolks set and separate.
- Imperial pintCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, or 2½ US cups. Using a US 16 oz pint with the full quantity of roux will give you something closer to a panada than a sauce.
- A very heavy rouxThree ounces each of butter and flour to a pint of stock makes a notably thick Victorian binding sauce. For a modern pouring sauce, 1 1/2 oz of each to the same liquid is nearer expectation.
- "Stir over the fire for a quarter of an hour"That fifteen minutes is not padding — it cooks out the raw flour and reduces the sauce. Keep it at a bare bubble and skim any skin that forms at the edge.
- The reserved butterThe nut of butter stirred in at the end is monter au beurre. It must go in off the heat, and the sauce goes to table at once; reheating breaks the gloss.
- Button mushroomsPeeling caps was usual when mushrooms came in gritty from the bed. Modern cultivated buttons need only wiping. Keep the lemon juice: it is there chiefly to hold them white.
- StockUse a light, unsalted veal or chicken stock. A dark or heavily reduced commercial stock will muddy the pale colour the sauce depends on.
- YieldAbout a pint of finished sauce, enough for six or seven servings alongside poached chicken, veal, boiled eggs or blanquette.
Sauce poulette is traditionally said to take its name from poulet, chicken — not because it contains any, but because it was served with boiled fowl, and by extension with veal, lamb's feet, tripe and mushrooms; the derivation is customary rather than documented. In the French system it is a velouté finished with a liaison of egg yolk and cream and flavoured with lemon and parsley, closely related to sauce allemande, and Escoffier gives a version of it. Cassell's, published in the 1870s, sets out the French method for English household cooks: the roux, the gradual addition of boiling stock, and the off-the-heat liaison.