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Veloute Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 cup white stock 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper In making, follow directions for White Sauce No. 1. A half cup of mushroom liquor may be substituted for half the white stock and a few gratings of nutmeg may be added.
A one-cup roux-thickened sauce built on stock rather than milk. The whole thing hinges on the quality of the stock and on cooking the flour long enough that it tastes of nothing.
- White stockUnsalted veal or chicken stock, kept pale by blanching the bones and not browning anything. A light fish fumet works in its place and is closer to what a modern cook would pair with poached fish.
- "White Sauce No. 1"The book's standard method: melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook them together without colouring, then add the liquid gradually and stir until it boils and thickens. Two tablespoons of each per cup of liquid gives a medium sauce that coats a spoon.
- Cook the rouxGive the butter and flour two or three minutes over moderate heat before any liquid goes in. Underdone flour is hard to correct once the liquid is in, and a stock-based sauce hides it less well than a milk one.
- Mushroom liquorThe strained soaking or cooking liquid from mushrooms, not a commercial extract. Half a cup of it replacing half the stock deepens the sauce considerably; it will also darken it slightly. It is usually strained through cloth.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon assumes unsalted homemade stock. With commercial broth, season only at the end.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for roughly four servings. It thickens as it cools; loosen with a spoonful of hot stock rather than reboiling hard.
- FinishingSimmer gently for a further five to ten minutes to lose any raw-flour edge, then strain if you want the smooth gloss the name implies. A little cream or a knob of cold butter stirred in off the heat is a common finish, though this version omits it.
Velouté means "velvety," and the sauce is one of the small group that Carême set at the head of French sauce-making in the early nineteenth century: a blond roux moistened with white stock rather than milk, which distinguishes it from béchamel. By the time this appeared in an American flour company's cook book it had been thoroughly domesticated — reduced to a variation on the house white sauce, with a line about mushroom liquor standing in for the long-simmered, repeatedly skimmed preparation of a professional kitchen.