Veal and Rabbit
One small Onion.
One small Carrot.
Salt, and a pinch of Mignonette Pepper.
Cook the flour and butter well together without letting them brown, stir in the stock gradually, add the sliced vegetables, the pepper and salt; stir it well, and let it cook well but slowly for half an hour, skimming it occasionally. Strain the sauce through a tammy-cloth, and set it aside until it is required for use. Then add cream, or other sauces as required. Velouté sauce is also the foundation of all the best hot white sauces, and it must be well boiled to make it "velvety."
This is a velouté — a blond roux loosened with white stock — and the text has clearly been separated from the top of its own ingredient list, which would have given the butter, flour and stock. Treat the printed lines as the aromatics only.
- The missing quantitiesThe recipe as printed begins mid-list: only the onion, carrot, pepper and salt survive. A common proportion for a sauce of this kind is equal weights of butter and flour, roughly 1 to 2 oz of each to 1 pint (2 cups) of stock; the more flour, the stiffer the sauce will set as it cools.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked white peppercorns; some accounts include a little coriander seed. Cracked rather than ground pepper can be strained out cleanly and so will not speck a white sauce. Ordinary ground white pepper works but muddies the colour slightly.
- StockVelouté means a white stock — veal or chicken, unroasted, unsalted and light in colour. A brown stock or a dark commercial base defeats the whole purpose. A fish velouté would use fish fumet instead.
- The hinge: do not colour the roux"Cook the flour and butter well together without letting them brown" is the instruction that decides the sauce. Give it three or four minutes over low heat until it smells biscuity and looks foamy but stays pale straw; the moment it takes colour you have a velouté that is grey rather than ivory.
- Half an hour is not too longThe long slow simmer is what cooks out the raw starch and brings impurities to the surface so that the skimming called for actually has something to remove. Keep it at a bare tremble, stir the bottom regularly, and skim the scum and butterfat that rise.
- Tammy-clothA fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois, or a sieve lined with damp muslin and pressed with a ladle, gives the same result.
- Cream at the endAdd the cream off the boil, once the sauce is strained, and do not reboil hard afterwards or it will thin and may separate. Correct the salt only at this stage, since reduction has already concentrated what was there.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe says only to set the strained sauce aside until required. Cover the surface with buttered paper or a film of cream to stop a skin forming, and reheat gently with a splash of stock.
Velouté is one of the sauces Carême codified in the early nineteenth century and Escoffier later fixed as a "mother sauce" — the white counterpart to espagnole, built on a blond roux and white stock rather than brown. The name is simply the French for velvety, and the anonymous author's insistence that it "must be well boiled to make it 'velvety'" is the practical heart of the classical method: the texture comes from time, not from thickener. Books of this kind taught sauces as a system, so a page like this one exists to be referred back to from a dozen other recipes — allemande, suprême, sauce poulette.