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Velouté Sauce
Substitute one cup of well-seasoned white stock for the milk in thin or medium white sauce.
This is a one-line variation on the book's white sauce, so the whole recipe depends on knowing the base proportions it assumes and what "white stock" meant.
- The base proportionsMany early twentieth-century American cookbooks give white sauce as 1 tablespoon each butter and flour per cup of liquid for thin, and 2 tablespoons each for medium; check the book's own white sauce entry, since this line simply borrows it. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook it a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the stock off the heat and whisk smooth before returning it to the fire.
- White stockA pale, unroasted stock from veal, chicken bones or a fowl, with no browned bones or tomato to darken it. Unsalted or lightly salted chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; the pallor is the point, since a brown stock turns the sauce into a different sauce entirely.
- "Well-seasoned" does the workWith no milk to soften it, the sauce tastes of exactly what the stock tastes of. Taste and adjust the stock before it goes in, and reduce it first if it is thin or watery — commercial low-sodium broth usually needs both reducing and salting.
- The hinge: don't brown the rouxVelouté is defined by being blond. Keep the heat moderate and stop cooking the flour as soon as it smells nutty and loses its raw edge; any colour in the roux takes the sauce away from a velouté.
- Simmering timeFlour-thickened sauces taste pasty until the starch has cooked out. Fifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer, skimming, gives a cleaner sauce; add a little more stock if it tightens too far.
- FinishingStrain through a fine sieve for the smooth texture the name implies. A spoonful of cream, a knob of cold butter, or a little lemon juice at the end are traditional finishes.
- YieldOne cup — enough to sauce fish or poultry for two to three, or to use as the base for a smaller quantity of a compound sauce.
Velouté is French for velvety, and the sauce is one of the "mother sauces" codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens and later carried into English through Escoffier and the cooking schools that followed him: a light roux moistened with a pale stock rather than milk, standing beside béchamel as its dairy twin. Its appearance here as a single sentence tacked onto white sauce is characteristic of American domestic manuals, which taught sauces as a family of proportions rather than a list of separate formulas — learn thin, medium and thick white sauce, then swap the liquid and you have velouté, swap in fish stock and you are most of the way to a sauce for boiled fish.