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Sauce Allemande (II)
(German Sauce.) Ingredients.
One ounce and a half of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Half a pint of Chicken Stock.
This entry gives only the ingredient list; the method has been left to the cook, as was common in professional manuals where the basic sauce technique was assumed. What follows fills in the assumptions rather than the missing steps.
- The half pint is ImperialThe half pint is probably Imperial -- a British half pint is 10 fluid ounces, about 1¼ US cups (roughly 285 ml). Against 1½ oz butter and 1 oz flour that gives a fairly thick coating sauce, not a pouring one.
- Butter and flour are deliberately unequalButter and flour are unequal here -- A classic white roux uses equal weights; the extra half ounce of butter would enrich the finished sauce and help keep it glossy, though the entry gives no reason. Cook the roux without letting it colour — allemande must stay pale.
- What the recipe does not sayA true sauce allemande is a velouté finished off the heat with a liaison of egg yolk and cream, sharpened with lemon juice. Neither appears in this ingredient list, so as written it is a plain velouté.
- Liaison temperatureIf you add yolks, temper them with a ladle of hot sauce and return the pan to a bare simmer only. Anything approaching a boil after the yolks go in will curdle it into scrambled threads.
- StrainingPeriod practice was to pass the finished sauce through a tammy cloth. A fine chinois or a doubled square of muslin does the same job and is worth the trouble for texture.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups, enough to nap four to six portions of poached fish or chicken. It thickens further as it cools; slacken with a spoonful of warm stock rather than reheating hard.
"Allemande" — German sauce — is one of the older names in the French repertoire, and the reason for it has never been settled; it is generally explained as a nod to the pale colour, in contrast to the brown espagnole. Carême counted it among his foundation sauces, and Escoffier later demoted it, treating it as properly a derivative of velouté rather than a mother sauce in its own right; the story that during periods of Franco-German bad feeling French kitchens preferred to call it sauce parisienne is widely repeated, though not well documented. Its appearance in a cookery manual, stripped down to three ingredients and a numbered variant, shows how thoroughly the French system had become the grammar of high-class English cooking: the pupil was expected to know the method already and needed only the proportions.