Sauce Supreme
Three tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one-half pint of chicken gravy; one lemon; one teaspoon of chopped parsley. Place two tablespoons of the butter in a frying-pan over the fire, and when it is hot, add the flour. Stir well, and when turning brown, add the chicken gravy or broth, and boil for four minutes, stirring constantly. Then add the juice of the lemon, the parsley, and the remaining spoon of butter. After the sauce has boiled up once it is ready to serve.
A thin, lemon-sharpened pan sauce built on a blond roux and finished with cold butter. The whole thing takes under ten minutes, and the only real decision is how dark you let the flour go.
- Half a pintOne cup of chicken gravy or broth. Against a single tablespoon of flour that gives a deliberately light-bodied sauce, closer to a jus lié than a gravy; it should coat a spoon thinly, not cling.
- "Chicken gravy"Here this means the strained pan juices or reduced broth from a roast or boiled fowl, not a thickened gravy from a jar. Good unsalted chicken stock works; a canned broth will probably need reducing to have any depth.
- "Turning brown"Cook the butter and flour only to the pale-blond stage, three to four minutes over medium heat, until it smells faintly of toasted nuts. Anything darker loses thickening power and will muddy the lemon.
- The final butterThe last tablespoon is an enrichment, not a thickener. Adding it cold, off the heat, and swirling until it disappears gives the smoothest result; the instruction to let the sauce "boil up once" afterwards can be skipped, though the flour in the sauce makes it fairly forgiving.
- Lemon lastA whole lemon is a lot for a cup of liquid. Start with half, taste, and add the rest only if the broth is rich enough to carry it. As written the juice goes in after the four-minute boil, with only a brief return to the boil after that.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed, on the assumption that the gravy arrived already seasoned. Taste before serving; a reduced stock plus lemon almost always wants salt and white pepper.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four servings of poached or roast chicken, veal, or sweetbreads.
Suprême in classical French cookery names both the best part of a bird, the boneless breast, and the pale sauce served with it: a chicken velouté enriched with cream and finished with butter and lemon. What appears here is a shortcut version, dispensing with the cream and the long-simmered velouté in favour of a quick roux moistened with whatever gravy the cook already had from the fowl. That thrift is characteristic of the Butterick book, published by a firm better known for dress patterns and aimed at middle-class households running without a trained cook. The recipe borrows a French name and something of the French structure, then trims the labour.