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Aurora Sauce
Mix in a saucepan a small glassful of mushroom liquor with half a pint of hot well-seasoned bechamel sauce, half an ounce of butter and two or three tablespoonfuls of red tomato sauce. Place on the fire for five minutes, stirring well the while, and then add some whole mushrooms cut in squares, and serve.
A compound sauce of the classic French kind: béchamel tinted and sharpened with tomato. It comes together in minutes, and the only real risk is boiling it hard enough to break the sauce or dull the color.
- The measurementsHalf a pint of béchamel is one cup. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. "A small glassful" of mushroom liquor is genuinely vague in this period — read it as 2 to 3 fluid ounces and add it gradually, since it is there for flavor and it thins the sauce.
- Mushroom liquorThis is the strained cooking or canning liquid from mushrooms, a by-product a large kitchen would have on hand. Substitute the liquid from a can of mushrooms, the strained soaking water from dried mushrooms, or a small quantity of reduced mushroom stock.
- Red tomato sauceA cooked, seasoned tomato sauce or thick purée in the French manner — not ketchup, which would make the sauce sweet. Two or three tablespoons into a cup of béchamel is the correct proportion; it should tint the sauce salmon-pink, not turn it orange.
- "Place on the fire for five minutes"Gentle heat, stirring, just to marry the sauce and cook out any rawness in the tomato. A hard boil will thicken it past pouring consistency and can cause the béchamel to separate. If it tightens, loosen with a spoonful more mushroom liquor or milk.
- The whole mushroomsThe wording is odd: "whole" mushrooms are then cut in squares, i.e. whole caps rather than pre-cut pieces, diced down. Cooked mushrooms are the safer reading; raw ones would release water into the finished sauce.
- Butter lastThe recipe adds the butter at the start, with everything else. Swirling it in off the heat at the end is the modern habit and gives more gloss, but it is a departure from what is written here.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a half, enough for four servings. It belongs on poached eggs, poached or steamed white fish, boiled chicken, or sweetbreads — anything pale that wants both richness and a little acidity.
Sauce Aurore is named for the dawn (aurore), the rosy colour of the tomato-tinted white sauce being the point of the name; the French repertoire is full of these small poetic labels for what are, technically, béchamel or velouté with one addition. Escoffier's Guide Culinaire (1903, and so later than this book) gives it as a velouté or béchamel finished with tomato purée and butter. Oscar Tschirky — maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf rather than its chef — records it here among the working preparations of the kitchen rather than as a dish in its own right. The mushroom liquor points to a large kitchen with such by-products on hand.