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Allemande Sauce
Use same ingredients as for Velouté Sauce, adding the yolks of two eggs and one teaspoon chopped parsley.
Cook one minute. 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour Béchamel Sauce 1 teaspoon chopped onion 1 teaspoon chopped carrot Sauté vegetables in butter. Remove vegetables, add bit of bay leaf ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon pepper 1 cup white stock flour and remaining ingredients, boil two minutes, and simmer ten minutes.
A richer sauce is made by adding one half cup cream. 4 egg yolks ½ teaspoon salt cayenne Béarnaise Sauce 4 tablespoons oil or butter 1 tablespoon tarragon vinegar 1 tablespoon hot water 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Mix yolks and water; add butter and set in a dish of hot water; stir constantly until mixture thickens; add seasonings and serve immediately. Tomato Béarnaise Sauce To Béarnaise Sauce add one fourth cup tomato purée.
Both Béarnaise and Tomato Béarnaise Sauces must be cooked at a low temperature, otherwise the mixture will not be smooth. The sauce should be creamy and of the consistency of mayonnaise dressing. 2 tablespoons butter cup bread crumbs
Allemande is a two-minute finish on an already-made velouté, and the hinge is heat control: the yolks must thicken the sauce without setting into curds.
- Start with veloutéThe base is a velouté: a pale, unbrowned roux of butter and flour moistened with white stock (light veal or chicken) and simmered. Allemande is that sauce plus the two yolks and the parsley. (The quantities printed on this page — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup white stock, with onion, carrot and bay — run together with the Béchamel entry in the text, so read them with care.)
- The yolksBeat the two yolks with a few spoonfuls of the hot velouté before returning them to the pan, and keep the sauce below a simmer. "Cook one minute" means one minute of gentle heat, just long enough to thicken; a boil will scramble the eggs and split the sauce.
- White stockA period white stock is unsalted veal or chicken broth made without browning. Commercial low-sodium chicken stock is the closest substitute, and you will want to hold back on the salt until the sauce is finished.
- Béchamel aromaticsThe chopped onion and carrot are sweated in the butter and then lifted out, so use coarse pieces rather than a fine mince. They perfume the fat; they are not meant to remain in the sauce.
- Béarnaise temperatureSet the bowl over hot, not boiling, water and take it off the heat the moment it thickens. The finished sauce should mound softly, roughly the body of mayonnaise, and it will not hold well once it cools.
- Tarragon vinegarBottled tarragon vinegar was a common pantry item in this period. If you cannot find it, steep a bruised sprig of fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a day; plain vinegar leaves the sauce tasting flat.
- YieldA cup of stock with the butter and flour gives roughly a cup or a little more of Allemande, enough to sauce vegetables or poached chicken for four; the optional half cup of cream stretches it further. The Béarnaise, on four yolks, makes something over half a cup.
Allemande, "German sauce," is one of the pale members of the classical French repertoire: velouté enriched with egg yolks and, in most nineteenth-century treatments, a little lemon. Carême grouped it with the great foundation sauces, and Escoffier later demoted it to a derivative of velouté, which is roughly the position it holds here. Its appearance in a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook reflects how thoroughly French sauce vocabulary had entered American domestic-science teaching by the early 1900s: Boston cooking-school graduates were expected to know velouté, béchamel and béarnaise by name and to be able to run them off in sequence, since each is a variation on the one before.