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Diplomatic Sauce
Pour three-fourths of a pint of bechamel cream sauce into a saucepan, mix with it a little of the liquor in which some crayfish have been broiled, and broil it quickly for a few minutes; then it is ready for serving.
A four-line sauce that assumes you already have two things on hand: a good béchamel and the cooking liquor from a batch of crayfish. Most of the work is in what the text leaves unsaid.
- Three-fourths of a pintTwelve fluid ounces, or a cup and a half, of finished béchamel (an American pint; a British pint would give fifteen). Enough for a fish course for several people, though the recipe gives no yield.
- "Broil it quickly"Nothing here can go under a grill; the sense appears to be to bring the sauce to a brisk boil and let it reduce and tighten for a few minutes. The same word is used of the crayfish, which were presumably boiled rather than grilled, though the recipe does not say in what.
- Béchamel cream saucePresumably a milk-based béchamel enriched with cream. Make it on the stiff side, since the crayfish liquor will thin it.
- The crayfish liquorThe strained, well-reduced cooking liquid from crayfish. Add it a spoonful at a time and taste: court bouillon is usually salted, and a reduced shellfish liquor can turn the sauce aggressively briny very fast.
- If you have no crayfishShells from shrimp or lobster simmered in a little fish stock and wine, then strained hard, give the same effect. Prawn shells toasted first in butter come closest to the original's depth.
- Watch the reductionA béchamel with cream in it will catch and scorch on the bottom the moment it thickens. Keep it moving with a flat wooden spatula and pull it as soon as it coats a spoon.
- FinishingThe classic version is mounted with a knob of shellfish butter off the heat and often gets diced truffle. Oscar omits both; adding a spoonful of crayfish or lobster butter at the end restores the colour and the round finish the sauce is meant to have.
- ServingThe recipe names no dish; the classic pairing is poached fish such as sole or turbot, and quenelles. Serve it hot but never boiling once any butter has gone in, or it will break.
Sauce diplomate belongs to the grand French repertoire of the late nineteenth century, where sauces carried names — financière — that later cooks have traditionally linked to occasions and offices, though the etymologies are matters of custom rather than documentation. In Escoffier's codification it is a sauce normande enriched with lobster butter and finished with diced truffle and shellfish, a luxury sauce for a luxury fish course. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and published his cook book in 1896, was not a trained chef but a maître d'hôtel with an enormous memory for what came out of the hotel's kitchens, and his entries often read like shorthand notes taken from a French brigade — hence the béchamel and, one might guess, "broil" appearing where a French cook might have said faire bouillir. Their cooking liquor was too valuable to throw away.