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Two Yolks of Eggs (Tablespoonful of Cream)
A tablespoonful of Cream.
A teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
One and a half ounce 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 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 the sauce through a fine strainer or a tammy-cloth. This sauce is the foundation of many fish sauces.
This is the classic sauce allemande — a blond roux velouté enriched at the last moment with an egg-and-cream liaison. The page as printed is the tail end of a longer entry, so the ingredient list is incomplete; the method, however, is complete and standard.
- The missing quantitiesThe recipe begins mid-list: only the cream and lemon juice survive, plus the ounce of butter named in the method. For an ounce of butter use an equal ounce of flour (a little under 4 level tablespoons) and roughly a pint (2 cups) of chicken stock. Those are the standard proportions for a velouté of this type, but they are inferred, not given here.
- The hinge: never let the liaison boilOnce the yolks and cream go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — around 180F/82C. Boiling scrambles the yolks and the sauce goes grainy past rescue. Pull the pan half off the heat and stir constantly until it visibly thickens and coats the spoon.
- Temper the yolksWhisk a ladle of the hot sauce into the beaten yolks and cream before returning the mixture to the pan. The original assumes a cook who knows this; adding cold yolks straight to hot sauce invites curdling.
- Roux without colour\"Stir a few minutes without allowing it to brown\" means a white or barely blond roux — two to three minutes over moderate heat is enough to cook out the raw flour taste. Letting it take colour would give a darker, nuttier sauce than the recipe intends.
- Lemon juice goes in lastAcid added earlier, or into a sauce still over direct heat, encourages the yolks to seize. Stir it in off the fire, then taste; the lemon is there to lift the nutmeg and cream, not to dominate.
- The half hour of simmeringThis is not padding. Thirty minutes reduces the stock, concentrates flavour and cooks the flour fully. Skim the surface as scum rises, and expect to lose a fair amount of volume — top up with stock if it thickens too far before the liaison stage.
- Tammy-clothA tammy was a loose worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine-mesh conical strainer, or a chinois lined with damp muslin, does the same work; press the sauce through with a small ladle.
- Yield and usePerhaps a pint before reduction, and less after the half-hour simmer; enough for several portions of poached fish or chicken. As the last line says, it is the foundation of many fish sauces: fold in chopped herbs, capers, mushroom trimmings or a little shrimp butter for the variations that may follow it.
- Holding itAn egg-thickened sauce will not sit long. Keep it in a bain-marie no hotter than 150F/65C for up to half an hour, with a butter paper on the surface, and do not attempt to reheat leftovers over direct heat.
Sauce allemande — "German sauce" — is one of the awkward names in the classical French repertoire, since nothing about it is German; Carême's writings on the sauce system are generally credited with fixing the label, and Escoffier later reclassified it as a small sauce of the velouté family rather than a mother sauce in its own right. The alternative name sauce parisienne is traditionally, though not documentably, attributed to Carême's own dislike of the German name. The construction is older than the name: thickening a broth first with flour and butter and then finishing it with yolks and cream belongs to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French tradition of the liaison, a technique that let a cook build richness and body into a sauce without reducing it for hours. In a book of "high class cookery" its presence signals ambition — this is the sauce of a household with a trained cook, a stockpot on all day, and someone to spare for the two-handed work of the tammy-cloth. The closing sentence, that it is the foundation of many fish sauces, tells you how such chapters were meant to be read: not as a list of dishes but as a hierarchy, learned in order.