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Poulette Sauce
1 cup Velouté sauce
1 cup cream
2 egg-yolks
Slowly add, with constant stirring, the Velouté to the egg-yolks, beat in the cream and reheat over hot water. Beat well and serve at once. It is improved by adding a little at a time, one tablespoon butter, the juice of half a lemon, a tablespoon of chopped parsley and a dash of nutmeg.
PERSILLADE SAUCE (PARSLEY SAUCE) 2 to 4 tablespoons chopped
1 cup medium or thin white parsley sauce
Add parsley to white sauce.
A classic egg-and-cream liaison built on velouté. The whole thing hinges on temperature control: the yolks must thicken without setting into curds.
- Velouté firstPoulette is a compound sauce, so you need the parent sauce before you start: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked to a blond roux, then whisked with a cup of white stock (veal, chicken or fish, matched to what the sauce will dress) and simmered until it coats a spoon. One cup is what this recipe calls for.
- Temper in the right directionThe instruction to add the velouté to the yolks, slowly and with constant stirring, is the safeguard against scrambling. Do not reverse it and tip cold yolks into hot sauce.
- Over hot water, not over heat"Reheat over hot water" means a double boiler with the water below a simmer. Cook only until the sauce is thick enough to coat a spoon; a yolk liaison sets somewhere in the region of 170-180F. Boiling will break it.
- Butter and lemon go in off the heatButter and lemon go in a little at a time -- The recipe says only to add them gradually. Easiest is to work the tablespoon of butter in in small pieces once the sauce is off the water, then the lemon juice; butter emulsifies more readily below a simmer.
- Yield and holdingAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings. "Serve at once" is meant literally; if it must wait, hold it in the covered top of the double boiler over warm (not hot) water for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes and whisk before serving.
- What it goes withTraditionally poured over poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads, mussels or mushrooms. Match the stock in the velouté to the dish, and if the meat or shellfish was poached, use some of that cooking liquid as the stock.
- The persillade noteThe second entry is a separate, much plainer sauce: two to four tablespoons chopped parsley stirred into a cup of white sauce (a butter-flour-milk béchamel, thin meaning about a tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of milk). Add the parsley at the end so it stays green.
- NutmegA dash means a scant pinch, grated fresh. Pre-ground nutmeg from a tin is flatter and you will be tempted to overdo it.
Sauce poulette belongs to the family of white sauces finished with an egg-yolk liaison that French cooking codified in the nineteenth century, and its name is usually taken to point at the bird — poulette, a young hen — the sauce having long been associated with boiled fowl, though in practice it turned up just as often on mussels, sweetbreads and mushrooms. Its presence in an American household manual shows how thoroughly the French system of mother sauces and their derivatives had been absorbed into ordinary middle-class cooking: the book assumes the reader already keeps velouté and white sauce in her repertoire and needs only the variation. The pairing with persillade on the same page is telling — one sauce built in stages from stock and yolks, the next made by stirring parsley into milk sauce — a fair picture of the range a home cook was expected to cover.