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White Sauce
Melt two ounces of butter, and gently fry in it two ounces of lean ham. Do not let it discolour. Stir into it one ounce and a half of flour, pour in one pint of white stock, and add six button mushrooms cut up smali, and two small carrots. Stir the sauce till it boils, draw the pan back, put the lid half on, and simmer gently for a quarter of an hour. Skim away the fat, strain the sauce through a tamis, add half a gill of cream, and the sauce is ready.
This is a velouté in all but name — a pale roux, white stock, aromatics, a short simmer and a finish of cream. Everything hangs on colour, or the absence of it.
- Keep everything blondThe ham must sweat without browning and the flour must cook without taking colour, or the finished sauce turns beige and tastes of toast. Medium-low heat throughout, and stir the flour for two or three minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- Half a gill of creamIn imperial measure a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz. Add it off the heat after straining; boiling it in serves no purpose and risks the sauce splitting.
- A tamisA tamis was a drum sieve of woven horsehair or canvas through which sauces were wrung. A fine conical strainer, or a regular sieve lined with damp muslin, does the same job.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock made from unroasted bones, kept pale and unsalted. Reduced commercial stock is usually both dark and salty; if that is what you have, dilute it and taste before adding any salt of your own.
- Lean hamTwo ounces of unsmoked cooked ham or gammon, chopped. Heavily smoked supermarket ham will dominate the sauce. The ham and vegetables are flavouring only — they are strained out and discarded.
- Quantities of vegetablesSix button mushrooms is roughly 2 oz; two small carrots about 3 oz. Cut both small so they give up their flavour within the fifteen-minute simmer.
- The half-on lidSetting the lid ajar lets steam escape so the sauce reduces slightly while staying at a bare simmer. A sealed pan will keep it thinner.
- Yield and holdingMakes close to a pint — enough for about four servings of poached chicken, fish or vegetables. If it must wait, press a butter paper or plastic film onto the surface, or it will skin.
A pint of white stock thickened with a pale roux is the parent of a whole family of English and French sauces, from sauce supreme to the fish and poultry sauces built on it. Nineteenth-century English kitchens used "white sauce" loosely — it could mean this stock-based sauce or the milk-based bechamel — and this version, with its ham, mushrooms and carrot simmered in and then strained away, sits close to what Careme's generation codified as veloute. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the 1870s.