Home › The Principles of Cookery › Royal Sauce for Turkeys and Fowls
Royal Sauce for Turkeys and Fowls
Take the breast of a cold roast fowl, free it from skin, and pound it to paste in a mortar with a slice of bread which has been soaked in milk and squeezed dry. Add as much white stock as will make the paste smooth and of the consistency of mustard, and a seasoning of pepper and salt, and simmer the sauce over a gentle fire. Let it cool, stir into it the yolks of two eggs which have been beaten up with half a cupful of cream, and stir the sauce again over the fire, but do not allow it to boil after the eggs are added. If liked, this sauce may be flavoured with five or six blanched and pounded almonds. Time altogether, about one hour. Probable cost, 10d., exclusive of the cold chicken. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A bread-and-poultry pur doesn't; this is a bread-and-poultry pur e sauce finished with an egg liaison e classic Victorian way of turning yesterday's roast bird into something to serve with today's. Most of the work is in the texture and in not scrambling the eggs.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inEgg yolks set from about 150F and curdle outright well before a simmer. Once the yolks and cream are stirred in, hold the pan over low heat and take it to no more than 175-180F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar does in ten minutes, but it gives a slightly stringy, elastic result with cooked breast meat. Pulse rather than run it, and pass the finished sauce through a fine sieve for the smooth texture the recipe intends.
- The soaked breadThis is a panada, the thickener in place of flour. Use stale white bread with the crusts off, soak in milk, then wring it out hard in your hands or a cloth — wet bread makes a slack, pasty sauce.
- White stockUnsalted or lightly salted chicken stock, ideally one made from pale bones with no browning. Commercial stock is usually salty, so season at the very end. The recipe gives no quantity: add it a little at a time until the paste is smooth and of the stated consistency.
- "Consistency of mustard"Thick enough to hold a furrow from the spoon but still pourable — the sauce loosens slightly as it heats and tightens again with the yolks. Judge it before the liaison, not after.
- AlmondsSweet almonds only, blanched and skinned, pounded with a little of the stock to stop them oiling. Ground almonds from a packet work but give a grainier sauce; sieve afterwards.
- The cold fowlUse meat that has been properly chilled and is no more than two or three days old. The sauce is heated only to a gentle simmer before the yolks go in, so start with poultry you would happily eat cold on its own.
- Yield and timingPerhaps a pint by the time the stock and cream are in, said here to serve six or seven -- realistic as a sauce rather than a gravy, allowing two or three spoonfuls each. The stated hour is largely pounding, so a processor will cut it considerably. Serve at once, as it thickens and skins over on standing.
Sauces bound with pounded meat and milk-soaked bread rather than flour are among the oldest in the European repertoire, descending from the medieval family of dishes built on almonds, breadcrumbs and white poultry — the same line that produced blancmange when it was still a savoury. The word "royal" attached to a good many nineteenth-century preparations, and the French sauce à la reine and the puréed potage à la reine are often said to work on something like the same principle. Its place in Cassell's is telling: the book's costings are given down to the penny, and this one prices the sauce at tenpence "exclusive of the cold chicken" — that is, on the assumption that a household roasting a bird on Sunday would have the breast of it left over, and that a cook worth her wages would find a second dinner in it.