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Sauce Chaudfroid Blonde
(Brown Chaudfroid Sauce.) Ingredients.
One pint of rich Espagnole Sauce.
Half a gill of Sherry.
Barely more than a note to a cook who already knew the method, this entry assumes a stockpot of Espagnole standing ready and a working knowledge of how a chaud-froid is finished and used. A few things need filling in.
- The measurementsA gill is a quarter-pint: 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American use, 5 fl oz by the imperial measure. Half a gill of sherry is therefore between 2 and 2.5 fl oz (roughly 60-75 ml) to a pint of sauce, depending on which measure the book is using.
- Blonde or brownThe heading and the parenthesis disagree. A true chaudfroid blonde is built on a pale velouté or suprême; what is described here, on Espagnole, is a brown chaud-froid. Follow the ingredients, not the title, and expect a dark glossy coating.
- The missing gelatineThis is the hinge, and the ingredient list omits it. A chaud-froid must set firm enough to coat cold meat and hold a pattern, which means dissolved aspic or leaf gelatine stirred into the hot sauce. Espagnole reduced from a proper veal stock may set on its own; a modern stock almost certainly will not.
- EspagnoleThe classic brown sauce: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours and strained. "Rich" here means well reduced and clear, not thickened with extra flour. A commercial demi-glace loosened with stock is the practical substitute.
- When to add the sherryOff the heat, at the end. Boiling the wine drives off the aroma that is the whole point of the addition and leaves only acidity.
- Working temperatureStrain the finished sauce through a fine chinois or muslin, then stir it over ice until it thickens to the point where it just coats the back of a spoon. Too warm and it runs off the food; too cool and it goes lumpy and dull.
- What it is forCold work: poached chicken breasts, galantines, tongue, cold game. The piece must be thoroughly chilled and dry before coating, and the coating goes on in two or three thin layers rather than one thick one.
- YieldA pint of finished sauce should coat roughly six to eight portions of cold poultry with enough left in the bowl to keep the sauce moving over the ice.
Chaud-froid means hot-cold: a sauce made hot and served cold, set with the natural gelatine of a long-simmered stock. Its invention is traditionally traced to eighteenth-century France and a dinner interrupted, the fricassee eaten cold the next day and found to be better for it, though the story is repeated far more often than it is documented. It is generally said that over the course of the nineteenth century Carême and those who followed him made it one of the foundations of the cold buffet, and Escoffier, later, codified the brown and white versions that this book takes for granted. Recipes as terse as this one belong to the professional kitchen rather than the household: the writer assumes Espagnole is already made, that the cook knows about the aspic, and that the sauce will end up masking something on a decorated dish under a coat of clear jelly.