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Duchess Sauce
Cut into small dice one-half ounce of cooked ham and two truffles; place these in a saucepan over a brisk fire with one-half wineglassful of white wine and let the liquor reduce for three or four minutes. Add one gill of good tomato sauce, boil for one minute with one tablespoonful of meat-glaze and add one-half pint of allemande sauce. Toss well while heating, but do not allow it to boil again, and serve very hot.
Dutch or Hollandaise Sauce Put one-fourth pint of vinegar into a saucepan with a small piece of nutmeg and a few coarsley-bruised peppercorns; boil it for a few minutes; then strain it into a larger saucepan; add two ounces of salt butter and stir it until dissolved. Lightly beat the yolks of eight or nine eggs, mix the boiling vinegar lightly in with them, then turn the sauce into the saucepan and stir it over or near the fire until thickened; do not allow it to boil again, or the eggs will curdle and spoil the sauce. When thick, put in one ounce of butter, stir it until well dissolved, then move it from the fire; add another ounce of butter in small pieces, and serve.
Two sauces run together in one paragraph: Duchess, a compound built on the classical allemande, and a Dutch sauce that is older and sharper than the hollandaise most cooks know. Both stand or fall on the same rule.
- Never let either boilAllemande is thickened with egg yolk, and the Dutch sauce is almost nothing but yolk. Once past roughly 180F the proteins seize and the sauce breaks into curds and liquid. Hold both at a bare steam, off direct heat if the pan runs hot.
- Allemande sauceNot a purchasable item. It is veal or chicken velouté finished with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison, sharpened with lemon. Half a pint here is one cup, so expect to make it first as a separate operation.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A tablespoon is a serious dose of salt and gelatin. Commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical stand-in, used sparingly.
- Gill and wineglassfulA gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz. A wineglassful in this period is conventionally taken as about 2 fl oz, so half of one is roughly an ounce, two tablespoons, of white wine — it is there to deglaze and reduce, not to flavor heavily.
- TrufflesTruffles appear far more casually in this repertoire than they would in a modern kitchen. At current prices a small amount of preserved black truffle, or truffle peelings with a little of their juice, gets the aroma without the outlay.
- The Dutch sauce is vinegar-basedA quarter pint is half a cup of vinegar to eight or nine yolks and four ounces of butter. That is far more acid and far less butter than modern hollandaise, which uses a spoonful or two of reduction. The result is thin, tart and custardy — closer to a nineteenth-century "Dutch sauce" than to the emulsion served on eggs Benedict.
- Salt butterPeriod butter was salted for keeping, and the salt is part of the seasoning. With unsalted butter the sauce will taste flat; season it yourself and taste before serving.
- TemperingThe instruction to mix the boiling vinegar into the yolks first, then return everything to the pan, is deliberate. Reversing it — yolks into a hot pan — curdles them immediately.
- YieldThe Duchess makes roughly a cup and a half, enough for four to six plated portions. The Dutch sauce, despite the yolk count, is a light sauce and yields about a cup and a half.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published this book in 1896, when American hotel kitchens were working straight from the French classical repertoire that Carême had codified and Escoffier was in the process of tidying. Allemande — "German sauce" — was one of Carême's mother sauces, a velouté finished with egg yolks, and dozens of named compounds like this Duchess were built on it; Escoffier later demoted it to a derivative of velouté, which is why it has largely vanished from modern kitchens. The name duchesse is one of a long series of aristocratic labels attached to garnishes and sauces in the period and carries no reliable connection to any particular duchess. The Dutch sauce that follows it is worth noticing for what it is not: the vinegar-heavy, yolk-heavy version here descends from English cookery books of the earlier nineteenth century, and sits alongside rather than behind the butter emulsion that took over the name hollandaise in the twentieth.