Home › The Principles of Cookery › Supreme Sauce
Supreme Sauce
Supreme sauce is very highly esteemed, yet cooks do not always agree as to the mode of preparing it. Two methods are here given. No. 1.--Take half a pint of stock which has been made with veal and chicken bones. Thicken this with white roux, and stir it until it is smooth and coats the spoon. Take equal portions of parsley, cress, and tarragon-leaves. Put these into scalding water for two minutes; then drain and mince them finely. Stir a dessert-spoonful of the chopped herbs into the sauce, and add salt and white pepper. Carefully add a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice to the sauce before serving. No. 2.--Put the bones of a dressed chicken into a saucepan with an onion, a small bunch of sweet herbs, and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Pour upon them a pint of good veal stock, and simmer this till it is strong and pleasantly flavoured. Strain it, thicken it with white roux, and boil it till the sauce coats the spoon. Pour it out, stir into it a small slice of fresh butter until dissolved, and add a flavouring of milk of almonds. This sauce is generally poured over the fish or meat with which it is served.
Two Victorian versions of a velouté-style white sauce, both built on veal and chicken stock thickened with a white roux. Neither is difficult, but the measures and one or two ingredients need translating.
- VolumesThese are Imperial measures: half a pint is 10 fl oz (1¼ cups), a pint is 20 fl oz (2½ cups). A dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons.
- White rouxEqual weights of butter and flour cooked together only until it smells faintly biscuity and shows no colour — roughly 2 minutes over low heat. For 10 fl oz of stock, 1 oz each of butter and flour gives a sauce that coats the spoon. Add the hot stock a little at a time to avoid lumps.
- "Coats the spoon"The test is what modern kitchens call nappe: the sauce clings in an even film and a finger drawn through it leaves a clean track. Simmer gently for 10-15 minutes so the flour loses its raw taste; a sauce thickened and served straight away will taste pasty.
- CressGarden cress or watercress, not the modern microgreen punnet used as garnish. Use the leaves and tender stems only; the two-minute blanch sets the colour and takes the raw pepperiness off.
- Lemon juice at the endAdded at the last moment, as directed, and best off the heat. Acid dropped into a boiling flour-thickened sauce can thin it and will dull the fresh flavour that is the point of adding it at all.
- Milk of almondsBlanched sweet almonds pounded with water and strained — a mild, dairy-free flavouring inherited from earlier cookery and still met with occasionally in nineteenth-century white sauces. Unsweetened commercial almond milk is the nearest thing; add it sparingly, as a larger quantity will slacken the sauce.
- Butter to finishIn No. 2 the butter goes in after the sauce leaves the heat, swirled until just melted. If it boils after that it will split and the gloss is lost.
- YieldRoughly a cup to a cup and a half of finished sauce, depending on how far No. 2's stock is reduced; enough to pour over a dish for about four.
The name is simply the French sauce suprême, and the opening admission that "cooks do not always agree" is honest: by the late nineteenth century the term covered a family of pale, rich chicken-flavoured sauces rather than one fixed formula. Escoffier's later codification settled it as a chicken velouté enriched with cream and reduced, and that is broadly the sense a cook uses today; the two versions here catch the older, looser English practice, one sharpened with green herbs and lemon, the other perfumed with nutmeg and almond milk in a manner that reaches back to much earlier cookery. No. 2 begins from the bones of a dressed chicken, the household logic of turning a carcass already served at table into a sauce worth putting a name to.