Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Admiral's Sauce
Admiral's Sauce
Add to one breakfast cupful of melted butter sauce two well-pounded anchovies, four shallots chopped very fine, one teaspoonful of chopped capers, and a very little thinly-pared lemon peel. Put all these in a saucepan over the fire, and let simmer until the anchovies are well incorporated. Pick out the lemon-peel; add the juice of one lemon and a small quantity of pepper and salt, and pour it into a sauce tureen.
Allemande or German Sauce Melt two ounces of butter in a saucepan over a slow fire with three tablespoonfuls of flour to thicken it. Stir well in order to prevent its browning; then moisten with one pint of white broth, beating all the time, and cook for ten minutes. Beat three yolks of eggs separately in a bowl; pour the sauce over the eggs a very little at a time; strain through a strainer, and finish with one half ounce of good butter and the juice of half a lemon, taking care that it does not boil a second time.
Two sauces run together in one paragraph here: an anchovy-shallot compound built on an existing butter sauce, and the classic egg-yolk-thickened Allemande. Both are finished sauces meant to be spooned over poached fish, boiled fowl or vegetables, not cooked further.
- Melted butter sauceThis is not simply melted butter. In Oscar's kitchen it means a flour-thickened butter sauce in the English manner, roughly a light roux moistened with water or thin stock and enriched with butter. Substituting plain melted butter gives you a broken, greasy result.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Treat it as one generous cup and adjust the seasoning at the end.
- AnchoviesSalt-packed or oil-packed fillets, rinsed and mashed to a paste, replace the whole salted anchovies the original assumes; two whole fish works out to roughly four fillets. The sauce should taste savoury rather than fishy. Because anchovies carry their own salt, season only after they have dissolved.
- Simmer, briefly"Until the anchovies are well incorporated" is a matter of three or four minutes over low heat with steady stirring. A flour-bound butter sauce held at a hard simmer will thin and then separate.
- Lemon peelThinly pared means zest only, with no white pith, and it goes in as a strip so it can be fished out. Adding grated zest instead leaves bitterness you cannot remove.
- White brothAn unsalted light stock, traditionally veal, or a pale chicken stock. Modern salted commercial broth will make the finished sauce too salty once it reduces, so use low-sodium and correct at the end.
- The yolk liaison is the hingeBeat the yolks, then add the hot sauce to them a very little at a time, as the recipe directs, and strain. Once the yolks are in, keep the sauce below a simmer, around 180F; a single boil curdles it past saving. The final butter and lemon go in off the heat.
- YieldThe Allemande makes roughly a pint; the admiral's sauce, built on a single breakfast cupful, makes appreciably less. Both are best made within the hour and held warm over hot, not boiling, water.
Sauce amirale belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of anchovy sauces served with boiled and poached fish, and the naval name is generally taken as a nod to that pairing rather than to any particular officer. Allemande, its companion here, was one of the sauces Carême codified as a foundation: a velouté finished with egg yolks, lemon and butter, and it was also known as sauce parisienne, a renaming often traced to post-1870 sentiment rather than to any single wartime decree. Its decline in modern usage follows rather from Escoffier's demotion of it from Carême's grandes sauces to a derivative of velouté. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, was compiling the sauce chapter of a working professional kitchen, and the compressed, run-together instructions reflect that: they were written for cooks who already knew what a butter sauce and a white broth were, and needed only the proportions.