Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veloute Sauce, Maigre
Veloute Sauce, Maigre
Put two pounds of fish into a saucepan with a small onion, a clove, a carrot, a bunch of parsley, a very small sprig of thyme, half a bay-leaf, and a little pepper and salt. Pour upon these ingredients a large wine-glassful of Sauterne or Chablis, or, failing this, of fish stock. Cover the saucepan, and let its contents simmer gently for five or six minutes. Add two pints of fish stock, or water and another glassful of wine. Boil the liquor, skim it, and let it simmer until the fish is done enough. Take it up, and strain the liquor. Thicken with white roux as in the last recipe, let it throw up the grease by the side of the fire, strain it, and put it aside for use. Whiting, gurnet, and pike are the fish best suited for this purpose. The heads and bones may be advantageously used for sauce.
This is a fish velouté — the same construction as the meat version, with fish stock standing in for veal. It depends on a stock built in the pan, so the fish and the roux matter more than anything else.
- What "maigre" means hereMaigre is the lean or meatless version: no veal, no ham, no meat glaze. It is the sauce to use when the dish it dresses must stay free of meat, which in period practice included the fast days of the church calendar.
- A large wine-glassfulA Victorian wine-glass is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so a large one is perhaps 2 1/2 to 3 fl oz. The exact figure is not critical; it is there to acidulate and perfume the stock, not to dominate it.
- Sauterne, then and nowNineteenth-century English usage of "Sauterne" was loose, and its pairing here with Chablis suggests a white Bordeaux drier than the sweet Sauternes sold under the name today. Use a dry, unoaked white — Chablis, Muscadet, Picpoul; a markedly sweet wine will make the sauce cloying.
- Cook the fish briefly"Until the fish is done enough" is a few minutes only. Whiting or pike in pieces is done in 6 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer; boiled hard or held long it goes to threads and clouds the liquor. Lift it out the moment it flakes.
- The white rouxA white roux is butter and flour cooked together without colouring, in roughly equal weights, worked in to the strained liquor as the previous recipe directs. Cook it until it smells biscuity but stays pale, or the sauce will be beige rather than ivory.
- Throwing up the greaseSetting the pan half off the heat so only one side simmers is a deliberate technique: the movement drives fat and scum to the cool side, where it can be skimmed. Skim as it collects, then finish through a fine sieve or muslin.
- Heads and bonesThe note at the end is the important one. Whiting and gurnard (the book's "gurnet") heads and frames are gelatinous and make a stock with body; pike gives a firmer, sweeter flavour. Rinse them of blood first and never let a fish stock boil hard or simmer past 30 minutes — it turns bitter and glue-like.
- Salt lastThe liquor loses some volume by the time the sauce has been thickened and skimmed. Season lightly at the start, as the recipe does, and correct at the end.
- YieldThe two pints of stock and the wine will give something under that volume of finished sauce once thickened and skimmed — a coating sauce, or a base for further sauces. Use it within a day or two, kept cold with a film of butter on the surface.
Velouté — from velours, velvet — is one of the foundation sauces codified in early nineteenth-century French practice and generally traced to Carême, who arranged the great sauces into a family with a stock-and-roux base at the head of each branch. The maigre designation belongs to the older Catholic kitchen calendar, which divided cooking into gras and maigre: days when meat was permitted and days when it was not. A large household needed both versions of every sauce, and cookery books of the period duly printed them in pairs. The fish named — whiting, gurnard, pike — are cheap, firm and gelatinous rather than fine eating, exactly what a stock-maker wants; gurnard in particular was long treated in England as a coarse fish fit mainly for the pot, and has only lately come back into favour on the plate.