Home › The Principles of Cookery › WHITE SAUCE (a French recipe)
WHITE SAUCE (a French recipe)
Take one ounce of good butter, put it into a saucepan, stir in a spoonful of flour, add a glassful of water, put it on the fire, and keep stirring. When the sauce boils, take it off, set it on one side, and salt it. Should it be too thick, add a little water; if too thin, a piece of butter rolled in flour. Just before serving, beat up the yolks of two or three eggs to stir in; warm the sauce, but take care not to let it boil; then put in a dash of vinegar.
This is a small white sauce enriched with egg yolks and sharpened with vinegar — closer to what French cookery calls sauce bâtarde than to a plain béchamel. Two things decide whether it works: the roux must lose its raw-flour taste before the yolks go in, and the sauce must never boil afterwards.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolksOnce the beaten yolks are stirred in, keep the pan below a simmer — roughly 160-180F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce turns grainy past rescue. Off the heat with constant stirring is safest, and it will thicken noticeably as it warms.
- "A glassful of water"Genuinely imprecise. A French verre of the period is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 6-8 fl oz, though usage varied; 1 oz butter and a level tablespoon of flour will carry about 1 cup of liquid to a light, pourable consistency. Start with 3/4 cup and thin as needed.
- "A spoonful of flour"A tablespoon, not a teaspoon.
- Cook the roux brieflyThe instruction to stir until it boils is short measure. Let the butter and flour bubble together a minute before the water goes in, then keep the sauce at a bare boil two or three minutes; raw flour has a distinct pasty flavour that egg yolks will not hide.
- Water, or something betterWater was the honest choice for a fast sauce with no stockpot to hand. Veal, chicken or fish cooking liquid in its place costs nothing and transforms the result — match it to whatever the sauce is going on.
- "A piece of butter rolled in flour"Beurre manié: equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the hot sauce in pea-sized pieces. Add it before the yolks, and let it cook a moment or the flour will taste raw.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks in a bowl, whisk in a ladleful of the warm sauce, then return the mixture to the pan. The original stirs the yolks straight into the sauce, which is why it warns against letting it boil afterwards.
- The vinegarA teaspoon or so of white wine vinegar, in at the very end and off the heat, as the recipe directs. It is there for lift. Lemon juice does the same job.
- YieldAbout a cup — sauce for four servings of poached chicken, boiled fish or asparagus. It does not reheat well and does not keep.
Cassell's marks this "a French recipe" because English white sauce of this period was generally milk-based and not thickened with egg, while French practice had a family of flour-and-broth sauces finished with a liaison of yolks. What is described here is close to sauce bâtarde — "bastard sauce", a name traditionally explained as marking it out as an illegitimate or roux-based counterfeit of hollandaise, though the explanation is customary rather than documented.