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Chaud-Froid Sauce
Cook one tablespoon of butter and two of flour, and add one cup of liquid, either milk, white stock, or the two mixed in equal quantities. Soften one tablespoon of gelatine in a little cold water and when the first mixture is boiling, add the gelatine. When thoroughly dissolved in the hot mixture, strain and let it cool. The sauce should be highly seasoned with salt, pepper and paprika, as a cold mixture requires more seasoning than a hot one. Cold boiled fish, hard boiled eggs, or individual portions of cold, cooked fowl, are delicious masked in this cold sauce and may be decorated with truffles cut in fancy shapes or with red or green peppers.
HORSERADISH (To Prepare for Winter) - To one coffee-cup of grated horseradish add two tablespoons of white sugar, one-half teaspoon of salt and one and one-half pint of cold vinegar. Seal in bottles.
A chaud-froid is a white sauce set with gelatine, spooned over chilled cooked food as an opaque coating. The whole thing turns on temperature: the sauce has to be cool enough to cling but still fluid enough to flow.
- The hinge: coating temperatureCool the strained sauce, stirring, until it thickens to the consistency of heavy cream and coats a spoon without running off. Too warm and it slides away; too cold and it sets in lumps. If it stiffens, warm it briefly over hot water and start again.
- GelatineOne tablespoon is roughly one modern envelope (1/4 oz, 7 g), which sets a cup firmly enough to hold a coating on a vertical surface. Old granulated and leaf gelatines varied in strength, so judge by testing a spoonful on a cold plate rather than by the measure alone.
- The rouxOne tablespoon butter to two of flour is a lean, flour-heavy roux and will give a stiff sauce; cook it a full two minutes before adding liquid so it does not taste raw. Add the liquid gradually and whisk hard, since this ratio thickens fast.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. A light chicken stock works; use the milk-and-stock mixture for fowl and eggs, and all stock (fish fumet is better still) for fish.
- SeasoningThe instruction to season heavily is not padding. Gelatine and cold both mute salt and pepper, so taste the sauce warm and then push it a step further than seems right.
- Coating and finishingChill the fish, eggs or portions of fowl thoroughly and set them on a rack over a tray. Spoon the sauce over in two thin coats, chilling between, and catch the drips to reuse. Decorations were traditionally dipped in liquid aspic and pressed on, then the whole piece glazed with a thin layer of aspic.
- Yield and holdingAbout one cup of sauce; how many portions it will mask depends on how thickly it is spooned. This is cooked food served cold with no further heating, so keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table and do not leave it standing out.
- The horseradish addendumA coffee-cup here is about three-quarters to one cup. "Seal in bottles" means capped clean jars kept cold, not heat processing; treat it as a refrigerator condiment and expect the pungency to fade over a few weeks. Grate horseradish in a ventilated spot, as the fumes are far sharper than onion.
Chaud-froid means "hot-cold": a sauce made hot and served cold, the name recorded in French kitchens well before it reached American cookbooks. It belongs to the elaborate buffet cookery codified in the nineteenth century, where cold salmon, galantines and breasts of fowl were masked in a smooth white or brown coating, decorated with cut truffle, pepper or blanched leek, and sealed under clear aspic so a dish could be built hours ahead and stand on a sideboard looking immaculate. Its appearance in a book aimed at home cooks rather than professional chefs shows how far restaurant garde-manger technique had filtered into middle-class American entertaining by the early twentieth century. The unrelated horseradish note tacked on at the end is the sort of short household preparation these volumes often carried alongside their主 recipes.