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White Sauce for Fowls
Take the neck, gizzard, liver, and feet of fowls, with a piece of mutton or veal, if you have any, and boil in one quart water with a few whole peppers, and salt, till reduced to one pint; then thicken with a quarter pound butter mixed with flour and boil it five or six minutes.
Mix the yolks of two eggs with one teacup good cream; put it in the saucepan, shaking over the fire till done.--Mrs. Dr. S
This is a giblet velouté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison — the classic accompaniment to a boiled or roasted fowl. Nothing in it is difficult, but the last step will curdle if the pan gets too hot.
- The hinge: never let the liaison boilOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, hold the sauce below a simmer — around 170–180F — and keep it moving. "Shaking over the fire till done" means until it coats a spoon, a minute or two; boiling scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks.
- TeacupNineteenth-century American cookbooks are inconsistent about the teacup: it is reckoned anywhere from about half a modern cup to three-quarters. Somewhere between 4 and 6 oz of cream is a reasonable reading here.
- FeetChicken feet are the gelatin in this stock and are worth seeking out at an Asian or Latin market. They need scalding and the outer skin and nails removed before they go in the pot.
- LiverModern practice leaves the liver out of a pale stock — it clouds and muddies it, and turns the sauce grey rather than white. If you want the liver flavour, poach it separately and use it elsewhere.
- Quarter pound butter mixed with flourThis is worked butter and flour in the manner of beurre manié, whisked into the hot stock in small pieces. The receipt does not say how much flour; equal weights of butter and flour is the usual convention. For a pint of stock, 4 oz of butter is a very rich sauce by current taste; 2 oz butter and 2 oz flour gives a sauce that still coats without being heavy.
- Whole peppersWhole black peppercorns, six to eight. They go into the stock and should be strained out with the bones before thickening — the original assumes you strain, though it does not say so.
- Mutton or vealA few ounces of veal shoulder or a veal bone adds body and keeps the colour pale. Mutton will make the sauce taste of mutton, which suited the period; lamb neck is the nearest thing now.
- YieldAbout a pint and a half of finished sauce — enough for a boiled fowl serving six to eight, with some left over. It does not reheat well once the yolks are in; make it just before serving.
Boiled fowl with a white sauce was standard company food in nineteenth-century Virginia households. The sauce belongs to the family of English white sauces that came into American books through the eighteenth-century English cookery writers, and it shows the older thrift plainly: the neck, gizzard and feet that came off the bird are simmered down into the sauce that will dress it, so nothing leaves the kitchen unused. The egg-and-cream finish is a liaison of the kind long established in English cookery. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by some 250 ladies of Virginia and her sister states, and many of the receipts o an an initial for a signature — this one included.