German Sauce
INGREDIENTS. 1/2 pint of sauce tournée, the yolks of 2 eggs.
AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Put the sauce into a stewpan, heat it, and stir to it the beaten yolks of 2 eggs, which have been previously strained. Let it just simmer, but not boil, or the eggs will curdle; and after they are added to the sauce, it must be stirred without ceasing. This sauce is a general favourite, and is used for many made dishes.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer.
SEASONABLE at any time.
GHERKINS, PICKLED.
This is the classic sauce allemande: a white stock sauce finished with egg yolks. The text as printed here has picked up stray "GHERKINS" headings from the neighbouring entries in the book, and the ingredient quantity has been garbled in setting — read it as half a pint of sauce tournée.
- The half-pint"1/21 pint" is a typesetting error for 1/2 pint. An imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or a generous 1 1/4 US cups, which two yolks will enrich comfortably.
- Sauce tournéeSauce tournee -- Not a modern shelf item. It is a thin veloute: a pale blond roux slackened with well-flavoured veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats a spoon, kept stirred so it stays smooth and free of skin. Any good veloute will do.
- The hingeThe yolks must never boil. Above roughly 180F they set into curds and the sauce breaks visibly. Keep the pan below a simmer, stir constantly, and pull it off the heat the moment it thickens.
- Temper firstBeeton has you strain the yolks and stir them straight in, which works only if the sauce is merely hot. Safer to beat a ladle of the hot sauce into the yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan.
- StrainingStraining the yolks catches the chalazae and any shell, and is worth doing — this is a sauce judged entirely on smoothness.
- "1 minute to simmer"Read as one minute of gentle heating after the yolks go in, not an actual rolling simmer. The sauce is done when it thickens perceptibly and coats the back of a spoon.
- FinishingThe period version is deliberately plain, meant to be adapted. A squeeze of lemon and a knob of cold butter off the heat brighten it; salt and white pepper to taste, since the seasoning depends entirely on the stock.
- Yield and useAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough for four servings. It is a coating sauce for poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads, eggs or vegetables, and it does not reheat or hold well — make it last.
German Sauce is the English name Victorian kitchens gave to sauce allemande, one of the great derived sauces of the French repertoire: a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. The name is traditionally explained as marking it out from the other "mother" sauces by its pale colour rather than by any actual German origin, and later French practice came to treat allemande as a derivative of velouté. Its presence in Beeton, filed alphabetically between the gherkins, shows how thoroughly the English middle-class kitchen of the 1860s had absorbed French sauce-making vocabulary: the recipe assumes a working familiarity with sauce tournée, for which she gives her own recipe elsewhere, much as a professional kitchen would. The egg-yolk liaison itself is older than the classification system, a long-standing way of giving body and richness to a sauce before reduction and butter-mounting became the default, and it survives today in dishes such as blanquette de veau.