Home › Sauces › Sauce Chaudfroid Blanche
Sauce Chaudfroid Blanche
(White Chaudfroid Sauce.) Ingredients.
Half a pint of Velouté or Suprême Sauce.
One gill of Cream.
One gill of Aspic Jelly.
Four sheets of French Gelatine.
One teaspoonful of Chilli Vinegar; Or, a dessertspoonful of Lemon Juice.
Warm up the Suprême Sauce and the aspic separately, then mix both together, soak the gelatine leaves, squeeze them dry and add to the sauce, add the vinegar or lemon-juice, boil up, allow this to simmer for a few seconds, pass through a tammy-cloth or fine strainer, add the cream and use as directed.
A coating sauce rather than a pouring one: the point is a smooth opaque white jacket that sets on cold poultry, eggs, fish or sweetbreads. Everything below serves that end.
- The hinge is the setting pointStrain the finished sauce into a bowl set over ice water and stir until it just coats the back of a spoon and shows a faint drag. Too warm and it runs off; too cool and it goes on in ridges. Reheat gently and cool again as often as needed.
- GillsThis is a British book, so a gill is 5 fl oz (150 ml), not the American 4 fl oz. Half a pint of velouté is 10 fl oz (285 ml).
- Four sheets of gelatineModern platinum or gold sheets weigh about 2 g each, so four comes to roughly 8 g, which is a reasonable reading of the quantity; leaf sizes have varied, so if your aspic is already firm, use three and test a spoonful on a cold plate before committing.
- Velouté or suprêmeVelouté is a white stock thickened with white roux; suprême is velouté enriched with cream and chicken stock reduction. Either works, but the sauce must be well reduced and strained beforehand or the coating will look grainy.
- Aspic jellyA clarified, well-set savoury jelly from gelatinous stock. A good commercial aspic powder or strong reduced chicken stock, clarified and set with gelatine, stands in. If the aspic is cloudy the finished chaud-froid will be dull rather than porcelain-white.
- Add the cream off the heatBoil the sauce with the gelatine and acid, strain, then stir in the cream once the pan is off the stove. Boiling after the cream goes in risks separating the sauce and greying its colour.
- Chilli vinegarVinegar steeped with dried chillies — easily made, or replaced with the dessertspoonful of lemon juice given as the alternative. Its job is to lift a sauce that is otherwise flat, not to add heat.
- Tammy-clothA worsted straining cloth wrung between two people. A fine chinois or a double layer of damp muslin gives the same result with less effort.
- Yield and useAbout 1 pint of finished sauce. Coat cold, dry food in two thin layers, chilling between, then glaze with clear aspic.
Chaud-froid means simply "hot-cold": a sauce made hot and served cold, and by extension the whole class of cold buffet dishes it coats. It belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of grande cuisine, the department of the garde manger, where cold food was built to be looked at as much as eaten — jointed chickens masked in white, decorated with cut truffle and blanched tarragon, then sealed under clear aspic and set on a mirrored dish. The name's origin is traditionally traced to an eighteenth-century French kitchen where a dish meant to be served hot was eaten cold and found better that way, though that story is anecdote rather than record. Its appearance in a book of "high class cookery" is telling: this is a recipe for a professional or a large private kitchen with a stockpot, a jelly bag and time, and it assumes the reader already has velouté, suprême and aspic on hand as a matter of course.