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White Sharp Sauce
Take a little white stock, and flavour it pleasantly with two or three mushrooms, a bunch of parsley, and some young onions. Strain it, thicken with white thickening, and boil till smooth. Stir into it a little tarragon vinegar to flavour it pleasantly, and add salt and cayenne, together with a small proportion of cream, and just before serving stir into it until dissolved a small piece of fresh butter. When a very rich sauce is required, the well-beaten yolks of one or two eggs may be added. Beat the eggs in a bowl. Let the sauce cool a little, then stir a table-spoonful of it into the eggs, and add the rest gradually. Stir the sauce over the fire for a minute or two, but on no account allow it to boil; then serve.
A late-Victorian velouté sharpened with tarragon vinegar and enriched, optionally, with egg yolks. The original gives no quantities, so treat it as a method and scale it to about a cup of finished sauce.
- White stockUnsalted light chicken or veal stock, ideally slightly gelatinous so the sauce coats. Start with 1 1/4 cups if you want roughly a cup of sauce after reduction and straining.
- White thickeningEssentially a white roux: butter and flour, in roughly equal weights, cooked over low heat only until it smells of biscuit, with no colouring. For a cup of stock about 1 tablespoon of each is a workable starting point; whisk the hot stock in gradually and simmer 8-10 minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Young onionsSpring onions or scallions, white parts, not mature cooking onions. The recipe gives two or three mushrooms but leaves the amount of onion and parsley open; a few of each, briefly infused in the stock and then strained out, is enough for a cup.
- Tarragon vinegarThe sharp element, and the point of the sauce. Add it a teaspoon at a time off the heat and taste; it should read as bright rather than sour. Cider vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig steeped in it for a day is a fair substitute.
- The hinge: the egg liaison"On no account allow it to boil" is the whole instruction. Once yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer — around 180F — and stir constantly; a single bubble will scramble them and the sauce will go grainy. Tempering as directed, a spoonful of hot sauce into the beaten yolks first, is not optional.
- Cream and butterA "small proportion of cream" can be read as 2-3 tablespoons for a cup of sauce. Add the butter off the heat, swirled in rather than boiled, as the recipe's "just before serving" implies.
- Holding and yieldEnriched with yolks it will not reheat well; make it in the last ten minutes before serving. The original gives no quantities, but scaled as suggested above it makes roughly a cup, enough for about four portions of poached chicken, veal, brains, or boiled fish.
The structure is textbook nineteenth-century French practice as taught to English kitchens: a white stock, a white roux, and then a choice of finishes — acid, cream, butter, or a yolk liaison — that turn one base into a range of named sauces. "Sharp" sauces, the English name that generally corresponds to the French piquante family, were a common answer to plain boiled or poached meat and fish, which needed acid to be interesting. The tarragon vinegar marks it as the pale, delicate branch of that family, the counterpart to the brown, shallot-and-gherkin versions. The instruction to add the yolks only "when a very rich sauce is required" is the kind of two-tier direction such cookery dictionaries often gave, a plain version and a richer one, leaving the cook to judge the occasion.