Home › The Principles of Cookery › Veloute Sauce
Veloute Sauce
Cut up the remains of a roast fowl, and take one or two bacon-bones or a couple of ounces of lean ham. Butter a saucepan, put in the bones, etc., with a quarter of a pound of veal, and add a small carrot, a small onion, one or two peppercorns, and a little salt and grated nutmeg. Pour over the ingredients as much water as will cover them, and let them simmer very gently till the liquor is strong and good. Strain it, skim well, and free it entirely from fat. Boil it quickly for a short time, thicken with a small spoonful of white thickening, let it simmer by the side of the fire till it has thrown up its grease, and it will be ready for use. A spoonful of gelatine may be used instead of the veal, if liked. Time, two hours to simmer the sauce. Sufficient for a pint of sauce. Probable cost, 9d.
This is a household velouté built from a roast chicken carcass rather than the classical veal-stock version, and the method is essentially stock-making followed by a light thickening. Read it as two operations: make a strong, clean white stock, then bind it.
- White thickeningA paste of butter and flour cooked together over low heat without letting it take colour. "A small spoonful" is vague, and much less than a full roux for a pint: about 1 oz each of butter and flour would give a proper coating consistency, but the sauce as written is meant to be lighter than that.
- Colour is the whole pointNothing here should brown. Butter the pan, keep the bones, ham and veal from catching, and hold the stock at a bare shiver; the recipe covers them with water straight away rather than sweating them first. A boiled, agitated stock goes cloudy and grey.
- "By the side of the fire"A range-top instruction meaning very gentle, off-centre heat where the pot simmers on one side only. On a modern hob, the lowest setting with the pan pulled half off the burner does the same thing: the fat and scum collect on the still side and can be skimmed away.
- Degreasing"free it entirely from fat" is emphatic, and worth taking literally, since bacon bones and roast fowl skin both render generously. Chilling the strained stock and lifting the set fat off is more thorough than skimming hot.
- SaltBacon bones or lean ham carry a great deal of salt, and the sauce reduces twice. Add no salt until the stock is strained and boiled down, then season at the end.
- The gelatine substitutionThe veal is there chiefly for body rather than flavour, so the suggested spoonful of gelatine is a shortcut to a similar gelatinous texture. Powdered gelatine is easy to overdo compared with the sheet gelatine and isinglass of the period; a teaspoon per pint is ample, and more risks setting the sauce as it cools.
- TimingTwo hours' simmering is right for poultry and bacon bones. Longer does not improve a light stock of this kind and starts to draw out a heavier, muddier flavour.
- Yield and useOne pint; an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, about two and a half US cups. It is a base sauce: finish it with cream, lemon, egg yolk, mushroom liquor or chopped herbs depending on what it is going with. The "probable cost, 9d" covers the bought veal or ham as well as the leftover fowl.
Velouté is one of the sauces Carême grouped as foundations of the French kitchen in the early nineteenth century and that Escoffier later codified as a mother sauce: a white stock — veal, chicken or fish — thickened with a blond roux and cooked slowly until it is, as the name promises, velvety. What Cassell's gives here is that idea translated into the economics of a Victorian household, where the carcass of Sunday's roast fowl and a couple of bacon bones were assets not to be wasted. The quarter-pound of veal is doing the job that a proper veal stock would do in a professional kitchen, supplying the gelatine that gives the sauce its body and gloss; the alternative spoonful of gelatine is a frank admission that a cook without a butcher's account could buy the effect instead. The nutmeg is worth noting as a period marker — grated nutmeg in white sauces and forcemeats was near-automatic in English cookery of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and largely fell out of that role afterwards.