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Bechamel Sauce
INGREDIENTS.
1/3 a cup of butter. 1/3 a cup of flour. 1 cup of cream. 1 cup of chicken stock. 1/2 a teaspoonful of salt. The beaten yolks of 1 or 2 eggs.
A dash of paprica.
The beaten yolks of I or 2 eggs.
Method. - Make the sauce in the usual manner, but do not let it boil after the yolks of the eggs are added.
Minced Ham à la Poulette.
To each cup of fine-chopped ham add one tablespoonful of fine bread crumbs, softened with cream or milk. Season with salt and pepper. Heat thoroughly and spread on rounds of moist buttered toast. Place a poached egg on each slice. Use two dishes.
Epicurean Canapés.
Heat a little butter in the blazer; sauté in it some narrow strips of bread and spread them thickly with the mixture used for epicurean sandwiches. Press a pitted olive in the centre of each and serve at once.
Three chafing-dish items have run together on this page; the sauce is the first, and its ingredient list is deliberately partial because the book assumes you already know the base.
- The missing base"Make the sauce in the usual manner" means build a white roux first: about 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, then the cup of stock whisked in. Season, then temper in the yolks off direct heat.
- Not a modern bechamelA sauce thickened with stock rather than milk, then enriched with yolks, is closer to what French kitchens call a velouté or sauce allemande. Turn-of-the-century American books often used "bechamel" loosely, for pale thickened sauces made with stock as well as milk.
- The hingeOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not boil. Egg yolk proteins set from roughly 150F and curdle by about 180F, so hold the pan well below a simmer and whisk constantly, or the sauce breaks into grains.
- TemperingBeat a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the yolks before returning the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to hot sauce is the usual cause of failure.
- "Paprica"The period spelling of paprika. A sweet paprika is what is wanted here, for colour as much as flavour; smoked Spanish paprika, though it existed, was not what American books of this date meant, and will dominate the sauce.
- The blazerIn the canapé recipe, the blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame. A small skillet does the same work; the water pan beneath is only for gentle holding.
- YieldOne cup of stock makes roughly a cup of finished sauce; the book gives no yield. It thickens as it stands and is best made immediately before serving, as a yolk-bound sauce does not reheat well.
- The minced ham"Use two dishes" most likely means a second pan is needed, since a single blazer cannot both heat the ham and poach the eggs. The recipe gives one poached egg per round of toast but no quantity of ham per round.
Béchamel is traditionally traced to Louis de Béchameil, a financier and household steward at the court of Louis XIV, though the attribution is honorific rather than documented and the sauce itself is older than his name on it. Here the sauce is finished with egg yolks. Its appearance in a chafing-dish chapter is telling. The chafing dish was the fashionable equipment of the period, sold for late suppers, bachelor rooms and college entertaining, and a cook working over a single spirit flame needed sauces that could be built in one shallow pan and served straight from it.