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One Shalot (Two ounces of Ham or lean)
Two ounces of Ham or lean Bacon.
One small Bouquet Garni.
One gill of Tomato Purée.
One glass of Claret or Sherry.
Mirepoix. Cut up bacon or ham into small pieces and fry slightly in the butter; add the vegetables, cut into slices, and fry five minutes; add the flour, and cook all very slowly together till a golden brown; add the stock and tomato purée and bouquet garni, and simmer thirty minutes; lastly, add the sherry, boil up, skim, and tammy, and it is ready for use. This sauce is the foundation of nearly all brown sauces.
Note. If bottled mushrooms are used they should be added with the stock; they, being damp prevent the flour browning.
Suprême Sauce (or Velouté).
Ingredients.
Two ounces of fresh Butter.
One and a half ounce of Vienna Flour.
One pint and a half of White Stock, made from Chickens, Veal, or Rabbit.
Half a pint of Cream.
Twelve Peppercorns (white).
A few Parsley-stalks.
Juice of half a Lemon.
Salt. Put the butter in a clean stewpan; when melted add the peppercorns, parsley-stalks, then stir in the flour. Cook this over the fire, stirring all the time, for ten minutes, then add the stock; stir again till it has well boiled; add the lemon-juice and salt, and, if at hand, some trimmings of white mushrooms, previously well washed and all water removed. Pass through a tammy-cloth, then add the cream, and it is ready for use. This sauce is the foundation of all the best white sauces, and it must be well boiled to make it "velvety."
Two foundation sauces run together on one page: a brown sauce of the espagnole type, and a white velouté finished with cream. The brown sauce entry is a fragment — its ingredient list has been cut off mid-line, so the butter, flour and stock quantities are missing.
- Missing quantities in the brown sauceThe heading survives only from "One Shalot" onward, so the fat, flour and stock amounts are gone. For the quantities given (2 oz ham, 1 gill purée, 1 glass wine), a working scale would be roughly 2 oz butter, 2 oz flour and about 1½ pints brown stock, but that is inference, not what the book says.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. "One glass" of claret or sherry means a wineglassful; period measure tables usually put this at around 2 fl oz, though the usage was never standardised.
- MirepoixHere it means the raw aromatic base itself — diced carrot, onion, celery and often a little thyme and bay — not a fixed weight. Two or three ounces of each vegetable suits the batch above.
- TammyA tammy-cloth was a worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a doubled muslin, does the same work; the point is to remove every trace of vegetable and peppercorn so the sauce is smooth on the tongue.
- Vienna flourA fine, hard-wheat flour milled in the Austro-Hungarian style, sold in Britain as a premium grade. Ordinary plain flour substitutes directly at the same weight.
- Cooking out the rouxTen minutes of stirring for the white roux is not padding — it is what removes the raw-flour taste and lets the sauce boil hard later without splitting. The instruction that it "must be well boiled to make it velvety" is the hinge of the whole recipe.
- Cream last, off the boilThe cream goes in after straining. Bring it back only to a bare simmer if it needs reheating; a hard boil once the cream is in risks curdling, particularly with the lemon juice already present.
- The mushroom noteThe warning is sound. Wet mushrooms release liquid that stalls the browning of the flour, so they wait for the stock. Bottled mushrooms are often packed in brine; if so, drain and rinse, or the sauce turns salty as it reduces.
- Yield and keepingThe velouté makes a generous pint and a half. If it is not used at once, press cling film to the surface, or float a little melted butter, to stop a skin forming.
These two entries are the British restaurant kitchen's inheritance from the classical French tradition. The classical system reduced the whole repertoire of sauces to a handful of "foundations" or mother sauces, from which the named preparations of the menu were derived by additions here is on this page, that one is the foundation of nearly all brown sauces and the other of all the best white ones. The naming here is loose in a way that later French codification tightened: suprême is properly a velouté enriched with cream, a derivative rather than a mother sauce, but Victorian and Edwardian English books commonly treated the two names as interchangeable. The tammy-cloth belongs to the same world of large brigades and cheap labour; it took two pairs of hands to twist, and it is often said to have gone out of use as the conical strainer and, later, the blender made the job a one-person operation.