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Sauce Allemande
Ingredients.
One and a half ounce of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
Half a pint of Chicken Stock.
The book gives only the ingredient list, so the method has to come from classical practice: this is a blond roux moistened with white chicken stock, i.e. a chicken velouté, which is the base an Allemande is built on.
- The weights in cupsAn ounce and a half of butter is 3 tablespoons; an ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup (about 3 1/2 tablespoons). Weighing is more reliable here, since the flour-to-liquid ratio is what sets the finished thickness.
- Half a pintIf this is an imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, half a pint of stock is 10 imperial fl oz, or just under 1 1/4 US cups. Using a US half-pint (8 oz) will give a noticeably stiffer sauce.
- Keep the roux blondThis is the hinge. Cook the butter and flour together over low heat for two or three minutes, just long enough to lose the raw-flour smell, and stop before it takes any colour. Browning gives a darker, gravy-like sauce, and the pale finish is the whole point.
- The stock does the workUse an unsalted or lightly salted white chicken stock, ideally one with some gelatine from wings or feet. Season at the end; a roux-thickened sauce reduces and concentrates, and salted commercial stock will overshoot.
- The missing finishA sauce Allemande proper is this velouey base finished off the heat with a liaison of egg yolk and cream, a squeeze of lemon and sometimes a little mushroom cooking liquor. The ingredient list here covers only the base, which is why it looks thin on flavour as written.
- If you add the liaisonEgg yolk goes in off the boil. Temper it with a ladle of the hot sauce first, return it to a pan below a simmer, and do not let it bubble again or the yolk curdles and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Straining and holdingPass the sauce through a fine sieve or chinois before serving, and keep it warm over water with a butter film or a round of buttered paper on the surface to stop a skin forming.
- YieldRoughly a cup to a cup and a quarter of finished sauce, enough for about four servings alongside poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads or eggs.
Sauce Allemande, "German sauce," is counted among Carême's grandes sauces, a white-stock velouté enriched with an egg-yolk liaison; the name is often traced to its pale colour rather than to any German dish, though this explanation is traditional rather than documented. Escoffier later treated it as a derivative of velouté, and it is frequently said to have been renamed sauce parisienne in some kitchens when German names fell out of favour, though the story is repeated more often than it is evidenced. Its appearance as a bare ingredient list is consistent with the way such books were used, assuming a reader who already knew that butter and flour in these proportions meant a blond roux and needed only the proportions and the stock specified.