Velvet-Down
(Gouffé's receipt, slightly altered.)- Take six pounds of veal and two hens with the fillets cut off. Put them into a stewpan with a quart of stock for every pound of veal and fowl combined. Boil it; skim it; add to it two sliced onions, two carrots, a faggot of sweetherbs, a little salt, mignonette pepper and sugar; and simmer all till the meat is cooked, when the stock should be strained through a napkin and freed from fat. Mix, without browning, three-quarters of a pound of clarified butter with the same quantity of flour; add the stock to it; stir it on the fire till it boils; then simmer it on the stove corner for two hours to reduce it to a cullis; get rid of all grease, and pass it through a tammy.
Mock Velvet-down. - Practically, this is a variation of what is called white-wine sauce, used with fish. One way of making it has been already described in treating of the Sole au vin blanc and the white Matelote, in both of which the thickening is produced by yolk of egg. In this case the thickening is made with white roux, and the result more nearly approaches in character to velvet-down; while at the same time the white wine in it gives it a special distinction. Mix together on the fire, without browning, four ounces of butter and four of flour. Moisten it with half a pint of plain white broth or of fish broth, and with another half-pint of French white wine. Add to it a chopped shalot, an onion, a faggot of sweet-herbs, some salt, and a little nutmeg. Boil it rapidly for fifteen minutes, so as to reduce it well, but taking care not to brown it in the least. Pass it through a tammy, and it is ready.
Venison
"Velvet-down" is the book's Englishing of velouté, one of the mother sauces: a white stock thickened with a pale roux and cooked long enough to lose all taste of flour. The instructions are professional shorthand from a French kitchen of the 1860s, written for a brigade cooking at scale.
- Scale it down hardSix pounds of veal, two hens and a quart of stock per pound of meat comes to roughly ten quarts of liquid and yields sauce for a banquet. A domestic version keeping the proportions would be 1 lb veal bones or shin, half a chicken, and 2-3 quarts of water or light stock, with the roux cut to the same fraction.
- The roux ratio is the hingeEqual weights butter and flour, cooked together without taking colour, keeps this on the white side rather than heading towards espagnole, which uses a browned roux and brown stock. Keep the heat low and stop before it darkens; the recipe insists on no browning at all.
- CullisAn anglicisation of coulis, here meaning a stock reduced and thickened to a smooth, coating consistency, not the fruit or vegetable purée the word signifies today.
- TammyA tammy cloth is a fine worsted sieve; the sauce was wrung through it by two people twisting the ends. A chinois lined with muslin, or a fine conical strainer pressed with a ladle, does the same job.
- Faggot of sweet-herbsA bundle of parsley stalks, thyme and bay tied with string — a bouquet garni. Tie it so it can be lifted out whole before straining.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked white peppercorns; some period sources describe it as white pepper mixed with a little coriander. Crush whole white pepper in a mortar rather than using fine ground, which clouds a white sauce.
- Clarified butterSpecified because the milk solids in whole butter scorch and speck a white roux during long cooking. Ghee works, or clarify your own and discard the foam and the milky residue.
- "With the fillets cut off"The breast fillets were presumably reserved for another dish, leaving the carcasses and legs for the stock. Buying chicken backs, wings and legs achieves the same thing without using up the prime meat.
- Timing and finishThe recipe asks only that you simmer until the meat is cooked; then give the thickened sauce the full two hours it specifies, to cook out the flour and throw off scum and fat. Skim repeatedly. The "stove corner" is the cooler part of the range, where a pan can be left to barely simmer without catching.
- The mock versionThe second recipe is a quick white-wine sauce for fish and is entirely practical as written — half a pint each of broth and dry white wine on 4 oz of butter and 4 oz of flour gives a thick sauce, so slacken with more broth if you want it pourable. Use a dry unoaked white; fifteen minutes at a brisk boil is enough to cook out the raw alcohol.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877), generally attributed to the journalist E. S. Dallas and named for Auguste Kettner's Soho restaurant, is arranged as an alphabetical dictionary of dishes, which is why a foundational sauce turns up under V, as "Velvet-down", just before Venison. The receipt is credited simply to Gouffé, presumably Jules Gouffé, chef of the Paris Jockey Club and author of Le Livre de Cuisine (1867), whose books were being translated into English by his brother Alphonse in these years and were widely consulted in ambitious Victorian kitchens. "Velvet-down" is often said to be Dallas's own attempt to naturalise velouté into English, part of a running argument in the book that English cooks were held back by their reluctance to use plain English words for French techniques — the coinage never caught on, and the sauce is still velouté.