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French Sauce
With the yolks of half a dozen eggs and one pound of butter prepare some bernaise sauce; season to taste with pepper and salt, and stir in with it one teacupful of tomato puree. When cooked, dissolve in the sauce one ounce of chicken glaze, and add one tablespoonful each of chopped parsley and slightly reduced chili vinegar. Stir it over the fire for a few minutes, then serve the sauce.
A béarnaise enriched with tomato and meat glaze — essentially a sauce Choron with a peppery edge. The original assumes you already know how to make béarnaise, and that a pot of chicken glaze is sitting in the larder.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmer"Stir it over the fire for a few minutes" means gentle, indirect heat — a bowl over barely steaming water, or a heavy pan off to the side of the burner. Much above roughly 180F the yolks scramble and the emulsion splits, and a curdled sauce is difficult to bring back.
- The béarnaise baseOscar assumes the standard: shallots and tarragon (often with chervil) reduced in vinegar and white wine, the reduction whisked with the yolks, then a pound of butter worked in warm and slowly. Clarified or well-softened butter behaves better than cold cubes at this volume.
- ScaleSix yolks to a pound of butter is a restaurant quantity — three cups or so of finished sauce once the purée is in, enough for perhaps ten to twelve portions of grilled beef or fish. Halve it for home use; the ratio holds.
- A teacupfulA period teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, not the 8 oz measuring cup. Use about 3/4 cup of tomato purée or a little less, and reduce it in a dry pan first if it is loose — extra water thins the emulsion and dulls the flavour.
- Chicken glazeGlace de volaille: chicken stock reduced until it sets to a syrupy jelly. One ounce is about two tablespoons. A commercial glace or a strongly reduced homemade stock does the same work; ordinary bouillon cubes bring salt without body, so season only after it goes in.
- Chili vinegarA Victorian pantry staple — vinegar steeped with dried hot peppers. "Slightly reduced" means simmered down to concentrate it. Substitute a good hot-pepper vinegar or cider vinegar infused with a couple of dried chilies, reduced by about a third.
- Serving and holdingServe within the half hour. Hold it in a warm (not hot) water bath around 130-140F; it does not survive chilling and reheating well and is liable to break, and an egg-and-butter sauce should not sit at room temperature for hours.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, where the French classical canon was the house language even when the names were loosely applied — hence a recipe called simply "French Sauce" that any Paris-trained saucier would have recognised as béarnaise tomatée, the sauce generally traced to and named for the nineteenth-century chef Alexandre Étienne Choron. What marks it as American and of its moment are the two finishing touches: the ounce of chicken glaze, a reduction from the stockpot that a hotel brigade always had at hand and a home cook almost never did, and the chili vinegar, one of the sharply flavoured bottled condiments that crowded late-Victorian sideboards alongside mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire. The result sits between haute cuisine and hotel pragmatism, which is a fair description of the Waldorf kitchen itself.