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Sauce Normande (For Sole la Normande)
(For Sole à la Normande.) Ingredients.
Two ounces of Butter.
One ounce of Flour.
One pint of White Stock.
This entry gives only the base — a white roux slackened with stock, which is to say a velouté. The method is assumed and the finishing that makes the sauce normande rather than plain velouté is left to the parent recipe for the sole.
- The ratio is the pointTwo ounces butter, one ounce flour, one pint liquid gives a light pouring sauce, not a coating one. The extra butter beyond a strict equal-weight roux enriches the finished sauce; it does not thicken it.
- Which pintIf this is a British book, the pint will be the imperial one, 20 fl oz or about 570 ml, not the American 16 oz. Using a US pint would give a noticeably stiffer sauce.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock, clear and pale, made without browning the bones. It should be unsalted or barely salted, since the sauce reduces. A fish fumet is not the same thing, though many later versions of this sauce use one.
- Cook the roux without colourMelt the butter, stir in the flour and let it cook two or three minutes over low heat until it smells nutty but stays blond. Any colour and the finished sauce will be beige rather than ivory.
- Simmer and skimAdd the stock off the heat, whisk smooth, then hold at a bare simmer for at least twenty minutes, drawing the pan half off the burner so a skin of butter and impurities collects at one side and can be lifted away. This is what removes the raw-flour taste.
- What is missingA true sauce normande is this velouté let down with the strained cooking liquor from the mussels, oysters and mushrooms that garnish the sole, then finished off the heat with egg yolks and cream and a lump of cold butter. Once the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil.
- YieldA little under a pint of finished sauce before the liaison, enough for a large sole serving four to six.
Sole à la Normande is a Paris restaurant dish rather than a Normandy farmhouse one, and is generally traced to the kitchens of the Rocher de Cancale in the first half of the nineteenth century; the name refers to the garnish of Normandy shellfish — mussels, oysters, shrimps — heaped round the fish, with mushrooms, croûtons and sometimes truffle. Its presence in a high-class cookery manual reflects the dominance of French technique in professional kitchens, where a cook was expected to know the mother sauces by their ratios and build the named sauces out of them. That is exactly what this entry is: not a complete dish but a building block, printed in the confidence that any reader competent to attempt sole à la Normande already knew how to make a velouté and only needed the weights.