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Trianon Sauce
To Hollandaise Sauce, add one half cup sautéd mushrooms and two tablespoons wine. Velouté Sauce 4 tablespoons butter nutmeg 4 tablespoons flour 1 cup white stock teaspoon salt ½ cup cream cup mushrooms Melt butter; add mushrooms, flour, salt, nutmeg and white stock; simmer ten minutes. Add cream and cook in double boiler one half hour. Just before serving add one tablespoon butter.
Two sauces are run together here without a break: Trianon is the one-line sauce at the top, and the Velouté that follows is a separate base recipe that happens to share the page. Read them as two items.
- The Trianon itselfIt is finished hollandaise plus half a cup of sautéed mushrooms and two tablespoons of wine, nothing more. Fold the mushrooms in off the heat, well drained, or the butter emulsion will loosen and separate.
- Which wineThe book does not say. In American sauce chapters of this period an unspecified "wine" is most often read as sherry or Madeira, and two tablespoons of a dry sherry is the safe choice; a tannic red would muddy the colour of the sauce.
- Heat disciplineThis is the hinge. Hollandaise breaks above roughly 180F, so the mushrooms should be warm rather than hot when they go in, and the finished sauce should sit no warmer than a hand can comfortably hold. It will not reheat.
- Garbled quantities in the VeloutéThe ingredient list appears to have lost its fractions in setting: "teaspoon salt" and "cup mushrooms" are ambiguous as printed, where the stock and cream keep theirs. Roughly half a teaspoon of salt and a modest quantity of chopped mushrooms suit one cup of stock; the nutmeg is given no quantity at all and wants a scrape or two, no more.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock made without browning the bones. An unsalted commercial chicken stock stands in acceptably, but reduce the added salt accordingly.
- The half hour in the double boilerLonger than modern practice, and it is not for thickening but for cooking out the raw flour taste. Twelve to fifteen minutes over barely simmering water gets you there; stir and add a splash of stock if it tightens too far.
- The final butterThe tablespoon stirred in at the end is a monter au beurre. It must go in off the heat, in a cold cube, for gloss; boiled in, it simply floats.
- YieldThe Velouté makes about a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings of poached chicken, veal or vegetables. The Trianon depends on the volume of hollandaise you started from.
The name is generally taken to refer to the Trianon palaces in the park at Versailles, in the manner of other French names such as Dubarry and Argenteuil that attach a court or place name to a fixed combination — here hollandaise with mushrooms and wine. Velouté, meaning "velvety," is one of the mother sauces in the system codified by Carême and later Escoffier: a white roux moistened with pale stock rather than milk, which is what distinguishes it from béchamel. Their appearance in Lowney's Cook Book, a promotional volume from a Massachusetts chocolate manufacturer, shows how thoroughly the French sauce vocabulary had entered American domestic-science teaching by the early 1900s, and the cookery-school habit of finishing sauces in a double boiler shows up here as a matter of course.