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Fricassee Sauce
Stir gradually the yolks of three well-beaten eggs into a basin with one-half pint of white sauce, put them into a jar and stand it in a saucepan of boiling water, and stir it until the sauce thickens. Just prior to serving, add the strained juice of half a lemon, after removing the jar from the boiling water.
A classic egg-yolk liaison for a white fricassee, written for a cook who already has white sauce on the stove. The whole thing succeeds or fails on temperature control.
- The hinge: never let it boilYolks set into curds somewhere around 180F, and once the sauce breaks it will not come back. Hold the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, and pull the sauce the moment it coats the spoon.
- "One-half pint of white sauce"One cup of a basic béchamel or, better here, a velouté made with the poaching liquid from the chicken or veal you are saucing. Have it hot but not boiling before the yolks go in.
- "Put them into a jar and stand it in a saucepan of boiling water"This is a double boiler. A heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water does the same job; the point is that the sauce never touches direct heat.
- Temper the yolks"Stir gradually" is doing real work. Beat a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the yolks first, then return the mixture to the rest, or the yolks will scramble on contact.
- Why the lemon goes in lastAcid can encourage a hot yolk sauce to curdle, so the juice of half a lemon goes in off the heat, at the end. Straining catches pips and pulp.
- Holding and servingIt does not reheat well. Keep it over the warm water with the heat off for ten or fifteen minutes at most, stirring occasionally, and thin with a spoonful of hot stock if it tightens.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a quarter — enough for a fricassee serving four, or a little more if the sauce is being spooned over rather than napped.
A fricassee is a white braise: chicken or veal cooked gently in stock without browning, and the sauce is what distinguishes it from a plain stew. The name comes from the French verb fricasser, and the technique of finishing such a sauce with beaten yolks and lemon — a liaison — was standard in nineteenth-century French kitchens, where it also enriches blanquettes and poached-fish sauces. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his book in 1896, and this appears in it as a bare component rather than a finished dish: the reader is assumed to know what a white sauce is and to already have a fowl in the pot. The lemon at the end is often said to keep a yolk-thickened sauce from tasting merely rich.