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Fish and Meat Sauces (Supr me Sauce cups hot Chicken)
1/4 cup flour Suprême Sauce ½ cups hot Chicken Stock • ½ cup hot cream 1 tablespoon mushroom liquor ¾ teaspoon lemon juice Salt and pepper Make same as Thin White Sauce, and add seasonings.
Maître d'Hôtel Butter ¼ cup butter ½ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1½ tablespoon finely chopped parsley ¾ tablespoon lemon juice Put butter in a bowl, and with small wooden spoon work until creamy. Add salt, pepper, and parsley, then lemon juice very slowly.
Two classics of the white-sauce family: a chicken-stock velouté enriched with cream, and a cold compound butter. Both depend on technique already covered elsewhere in the book, so the amounts here are seasonings rather than a full method.
- Thin White Sauce, in this bookThe reference means roughly 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of liquid. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook the roux a minute without colouring, then add the hot stock and cream gradually.
- Mushroom liquorThe strained soaking or cooking liquid from mushrooms, not a spirit. Canned mushroom liquid or the reduced liquid from sautéed mushrooms both serve; a tablespoon is there for depth, not mushroom flavour as such.
- Chicken stockUnsalted or lightly salted homemade stock is assumed. Commercial broth is already salted, so hold back the salt until the sauce has thickened and been tasted.
- Don't boil after the creamDon't boil hard after the cream -- Add the hot cream to the thickened stock base and keep the sauce below a hard boil; prolonged boiling dulls it. The recipe simply says to add the seasonings at the end, and the lemon juice is best stirred in last.
- Fractions in the ingredient listSeveral of the quantities as printed are unclear — the lemon juice in each sauce and the butter for the maître d'hôtel among them. Work by proportion instead: about a quarter cup of butter to a tablespoon or so of parsley and a teaspoon or two of lemon juice.
- Working the butterThe butter must be soft but not melted. Creaming it first, then adding the lemon juice slowly as the recipe directs, works the acid in; poured in at once it tends to bead out and the butter separates.
- Shaping and keepingThe finished butter can be chilled firm and sliced to melt over grilled fish, steak or boiled vegetables. It keeps about a week refrigerated and will freeze.
- YieldThe suprême makes about two cups, enough for six to eight servings of poached chicken or fish. The compound butter makes about a quarter cup, enough for four to six portions.
Sauce suprême is the standard enrichment of velouté in the French repertoire — a chicken velouté finished with cream and mushroom liquor — and Fannie Farmer's version is a compressed, American-kitchen translation of it, hung on the book's own graduated white-sauce table rather than on a classical mother-sauce chart. That table, running from thin to thick by the spoonful of butter and flour per cup of liquid, was one of the Boston Cooking School's characteristic teaching devices: learn one ratio and the named sauces follow. Maître d'hôtel butter belongs to a different family altogether, the cold compound butters, and its name simply means the steward's or head-of-house's butter; it appears in nineteenth-century French and English cookery as a quick sauce for a grilled chop or a broiled fish.