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Sauce Allemande
To Velouté Sauce add one teaspoon lemon juice and yolk one egg.
A one-line finishing formula that assumes you already have velouté on the stove. Everything that can go wrong here happens in the last thirty seconds.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolkEgg yolk added to a simmering sauce curdles into grains almost instantly. Pull the pan off the heat, whisk a few spoonfuls of hot velouté into the beaten yolk to temper it, return the mixture to the pan, and warm it only until it thickens visibly — well below a simmer.
- What velouté means hereWhat veloute means here -- a white roux of butter and flour cooked without colouring, moistened with white stock (veal, chicken or fish) and simmered until smooth; see the book's own veloute recipe for its proportions. Its quality is entirely the stock's; a weak or salty commercial broth gives a weak, salty sauce.
- Proportions impliedProportions -- the recipe fixes neither the quantity of veloute nor a yield. One yolk and one teaspoon of lemon juice will finish roughly a cup of sauce; scaling up, keep to about one yolk per cup, as more makes the sauce heavy and custardy rather than glossy.
- Lemon juice lastAdd the acid at the end, off the heat, and taste. Its job is to lift the flour-and-stock flatness, not to make the sauce taste of lemon.
- StrainingPass the finished sauce through a fine sieve before serving. Even a careful cook gets a few threads of set yolk, and the sieve is the difference between a sauce that looks professional and one that does not.
- Holding and reheatingAn egg-liaison sauce will not hold on direct heat and will not reheat well. Keep it in a bowl over warm (not simmering) water for at most half an hour, with a film of butter or a round of buttered paper on the surface to stop a skin forming.
- ServingThe classic pairings are poached or boiled white meats and fish — chicken, veal, sweetbreads, cod — and boiled vegetables such as asparagus or celery.
Sauce allemande, "German sauce," is one of the sauces codified in nineteenth-century French practice: velouté enriched and bound with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon, which Carême's generation ranked among the great mother sauces alongside espagnole and velouté itself. Later French authorities, Escoffier among them, demoted it to a derivative of velouté rather than a foundation in its own right, and it is often said that during the First World War the name gave way in France to sauce parisienne or sauce blonde — a patriotic renaming of the same yellow sauce, though the documentation for this is thin. Its appearance in Fannie Farmer as a single terse line might be read as typical of the book's method: the sauce chapter can look like a family tree, with a handful of base sauces given in full and the classical derivatives reduced to the one or two additions that distinguish them.