Velvet Sauce
4 Tablespoons Butter 1/2 Tablespoons Flour (barley) 2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 1 Quart Chicken or Veal Stock 1/2 Cup Mushroom Liquor 6 Whole Peppers Salt and Dash of Nutmeg Combine as directed in white sauce, using stock in place of milk. Boil twenty minutes. Skim and simmer for one hour.
Strain and season if necessary. Add a few drops of kitchen bouquet.
This is a velouté under another name: a pale roux loosened with stock rather than milk, then cooked long enough to lose any trace of raw flour. The long simmer is the whole point, and it also determines the final texture.
- The hinge: reduction, not thickenerThe long cooking — Twenty minutes at a boil followed by an hour's simmer will reduce the liquid noticeably, so the finished sauce owes some of its body to reduction as well as to the cornstarch. How much you lose will depend on your pan and heat.
- "Combine as directed in white sauce"Melt the butter, stir in the barley flour and cornstarch, cook the paste a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the hot stock gradually while whisking. The mushroom liquor is presumably added with the stock, though the recipe does not say.
- The flour quantity is ambiguousHalf a tablespoon of flour against 4 tablespoons of butter and 2 of cornstarch is out of proportion for a roux and may be a misprint for 1 1/2. Barley flour thickens less firmly than wheat; plain wheat flour works and is easier to find.
- Whole peppersWhole peppercorns, not ground pepper. Left whole, they are caught by the strainer at the end.
- Mushroom liquorThe soaking or cooking liquid from mushrooms. Strained liquid from rehydrated dried mushrooms, or the pan liquid from sautéed fresh ones, both do the job; bottled mushroom ketchup is far saltier and not a substitute.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid still sold today. A few drops only, for colour depth; more will make the sauce muddy and slightly bitter. It can simply be left out.
- Salt lateBecause the sauce reduces during the boiling and simmering, season at the end as instructed rather than at the start, especially with a commercial stock.
- YieldSomewhat less than the quart and a half-cup of liquid you start with, depending on how hard it reduces; a sauce for chicken, veal or sweetbreads.
"Velvet sauce" is a plain-English rendering of the French velouté — a white sauce built on meat stock instead of milk, one of the standard mother sauces of professional cookery. Books of this kind tended to strip the French vocabulary out and reduce a chef's method to a fixed set of proportions, which is why the instruction here is simply to follow the white sauce entry and swap the liquid. The mushroom liquor and the dash of nutmeg are old habits of the classic version, and the drops of Kitchen Bouquet are pure period convenience: a bottled browning sauce that let a home cook borrow the colour of a long-simmered restaurant sauce without keeping a stockpot going.