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White Sauce for Turkey or Fowl
Take the head, neck, heart, and feet of the birds, wash them thoroughly in hot water, cut them into small pieces, and put these into a saucepan with a slice of lean veal, two springs of parsley, a sprig of thyme, a square inch of thin lemon-rind, a blade of mace, three peppercorns, and a quart of cold water. Cover closely, and simmer gently till the stock is strong and good. Strain the liquor through a napkin laid in a sieve, and when cold free it entirely from fat. Put a tumblerful into a saucepan, and let it boil. Stir into it a table-spoonful of flour which has been mixed to a smooth paste with a little cold milk, and add more milk or cream to make it equal the measure of the stock. Stir the sauce over the fire till it is white and thick, and add pepper and salt if required. If the sauce is to be poured over cold poultry, it should be made thick enough to adhere to the birds: therefore, less stock should be used for the sauce, but a little more flour and cream. When more convenient, the veal may be omitted, and a tea-spoonful of gelatine may be used instead. The liquor in which poultry, veal, or rabbits have been boiled is excellent for making white sauce. Time to simmer the stock, about two hours; to simmer the sauce; a few minutes. Probable cost, 6d., if made with milk. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A giblet-based velouté rather than a milk béchamel: the flavour comes from the stock, so the two-hour simmer is the part that matters. Everything after it takes five minutes.
- A tumblerfulRoughly 8 to 10 fl oz, that is 1 to 1¼ cups. The proportion that matters is equal volumes of stock and milk or cream, thickened with a tablespoon of flour, which gives a pouring sauce rather than a coating one.
- Heads and feetSupermarket poultry no longer comes with them. Use the neck, heart, gizzard and wing tips from the bird, or ask a butcher for chicken feet, which are often stocked by Asian and Caribbean grocers and give the stock real body.
- Lean veal, or notThe veal is there for gelatine and a neutral savoury depth. The recipe's own substitute, a teaspoon of powdered gelatine, works, as does a strip of pork rind or simply a second set of wing tips.
- A blade of maceMace is the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold whole as blades or ground. A blade is about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace; add ground mace to the stock rather than the finished sauce so it has time to soften.
- Keep it paleNothing here should colour. Simmer the stock at a bare tremble and skim it, and cook the flour paste in the boiling stock only long enough to lose its raw taste. Browning either stage gives a grey sauce.
- Flour slaked in cold milkMixing the flour to a paste with cold milk before it meets hot liquid is the whole lump-prevention method, and it still works. Pour it into the boiling stock in a thin stream while whisking, then let it bubble a minute or two.
- The cold-poultry versionFor a coating sauce, use less stock and a little more flour, with cream in place of some of the milk; the recipe gives no figures, so work by eye. Chill a spoonful on a saucer to check it sets firm enough to cling.
- YieldAbout a pint, enough for five or six as written. The strained stock freezes well, so make the full quart and keep what you do not use.
White sauce for boiled fowl was a fixture of nineteenth-century English cookery, and its logic is thrift as much as flavour: the bird's head, neck, feet and giblets were paid for and would otherwise be wasted, so they became the stock that dressed the bird itself. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later revised edition of a work whose first version dates from the 1870s, treats the method as generic rather than particular — the same technique yields sauce for rabbit, veal or boiled chicken, and the book duly says so. The <q>probable cost, 6d.</q> is characteristic of the period's household manuals, which assumed a cook working to a budget set by someone else. It sits close to what French cookery calls a velouté, a pale sauce built on stock rather than milk, though here the thickening comes from flour slaked in cold milk rather than a roux; English kitchens generally called any pale sauce a white sauce and left the distinction to the professionals.