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Poulette Sauce
To White Sauce add one half cup cream; when boiling pour on to two egg yolks slightly beaten, cook one minute; add one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon chopped parsley, and two tablespoons lemon juice.
A short recipe that assumes you already have the book's White Sauce standing by. Everything that can go wrong here happens in the last two minutes.
- The hinge: keep it off the boil after the yolks go inOnce the yolks are in, the sauce must not return to a full boil or it will scramble. "Cook one minute" means one minute over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens slightly and coats the spoon.
- Temper first, despite the wordingThe instruction to pour boiling sauce onto the yolks works only if you add it in a thin stream while whisking hard, then return the mixture to the pan. Dumping it in all at once will set the yolks in threads.
- The White Sauce baseThe recipe assumes the book's own White Sauce, made earlier; a medium white sauce of this period is generally in the region of equal tablespoons of butter and flour to a cup of milk. Any modern medium bechamel of similar proportions serves.
- Lemon juice last, and off the heatTwo tablespoons is a good deal of acid for a sauce of this size, and adding it while the pan is hot encourages curdling. Pull the pan off the burner, then stir it in.
- Butter for finish, not for cookingThe tablespoon of butter at the end is a monter au beurre — it should melt into the sauce off the heat to give gloss. Whisk it in in a piece or two rather than letting it boil.
- Season itThe recipe gives no salt or pepper, on the assumption the White Sauce was seasoned. Taste at the end, after the cream and lemon are in.
- Yield and servingQuantity depends on how much White Sauce you start with. It is a coating sauce for poached chicken or veal, steamed mussels, asparagus, or boiled new potatoes, and does not reheat well -- make it to order.
Sauce poulette is one of the small egg-and-lemon finishes of the classical French repertoire, built by enriching a white sauce with yolks, butter and acid -- the same logic as sauce allemande, to which it is closely related. The name is generally taken from poulet/poulette, chicken, though in France it was as often ladled over tripe, mussels or mushrooms as over poultry; tripes a la poulette and moules a la poulette remain the dishes most associated with it. Its appearance in a book published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, says something about how such volumes worked: the chocolate recipes sold the product, but the book had to earn its place on the shelf as a general cookery manual, which meant French sauces and their derivatives presented for American home cooks in a few lines each.