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Two Yolks of Eggs (Tablespoonful of Cream) (II)
A tablespoonful of Cream.
A tablespoonful of Lemon Juice.
One ounce and a half of Butter. One ounce of Flour. Half a pint of Chicken Stock. Pepper, Salt and Nutmeg. Dissolve an ounce of butter in a stewpan, add the flour, stir a few minutes without allowing it to brown. Add the chicken stock, and stir until it boils. Season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Let it simmer for half an hour. Skim, and finish with a liaison of two yolks of eggs, a tablespoonful of cream, and half an ounce of fresh butter. Stir over the fire until the eggs begin to set, but do not let it boil. Add a teaspoonful of lemon juice, and pass through a fine strainer or tammy cloth.
This is a sauce allemande — a chicken-stock velouté enriched at the last moment with egg yolks and cream. The page has been printed with its ingredient list truncated, so read the method carefully before starting.
- The missing quantitiesThe recipe assumes a companion list that is not on the page. One ounce of butter is given, but the flour and stock are not; a standard velouté of this type uses equal weights of butter and flour (1 oz each) to about a pint of stock. Treat that as a reconstruction, not as the book's own figure.
- The hinge: do not boil the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the sauce must not simmer. Yolks set at roughly 160–180F and the sauce will curdle into grainy threads if it approaches boiling. Pull the pan half off the heat and stir until it visibly thickens and coats the spoon.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan, usually with a lid. Any heavy-bottomed saucepan works; thin metal will scorch the roux and colour the sauce, which this recipe specifically tells you to avoid.
- Half an hour of simmeringThat long, slow simmer is not padding — it cooks out the raw taste of the flour and reduces the stock to real body. Ten minutes gives a pasty sauce. Skim the surface as instructed; that is where the released fat and albumen collect.
- Tammy clothA tammy was a worsted straining cloth that the sauce was wrung through, a laborious step in Victorian professional kitchens. A fine conical strainer, or a sieve lined with muslin, does the same work.
- Lemon juice lastThe acid goes in after the eggs and off the heat. Added earlier it can encourage the sauce to break, and its freshness is the point of it.
- NutmegGrate it from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of the volatile oil that makes this seasoning register at all in a mild cream sauce.
- Yield and useIf the reconstructed pint of stock is right, this would make roughly a pint, enough for six to eight portions. It suits poached or boiled fish, boiled chicken or sweetbreads; the page as printed gives no indication of where the recipe sat in the book.
- Holding itIt will not reheat well once the yolks are in. Make the velouté base ahead if you like, then add the liaison within a few minutes of serving.
Sauce allemande - veloute finished with a liaison of yolks and cream - was one of the small number of "mother" and derivative sauces on which nineteenth-century professional cookery was built, and Carême is generally credited with fixing its place in that hierarchy. Its name became awkward in Britain and France during and after the First World War, and it is often found relabelled sauce parisienne or simply sauce blonde. The odd title of this page appears to derive from a surviving ingredient line rather than from the name of the dish; how that came about cannot be established from the page itself. The technique is older than the classified sauce lists; thickening a broth with beaten yolks at the very end goes back at least to medieval European cookery, where it was one of the few ways to give a liquid richness without long reduction.