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Liaison of Butter and Cream
The same as liaison of butter with the addition of cream. Beat the butter and cream together and stir into the sauce.
This is a cross-referenced fragment: it assumes you have already read the entry for liaison of butter, and it gives no quantities at all. What follows fills in the working details a modern cook needs to use it.
- The hinge: no boiling afterwardsOnce the butter-and-cream liaison goes in, the sauce must not return to a boil. Butter beaten into a hot liquid holds as an emulsion only below simmering point; a hard boil breaks it and you get a greasy film on top rather than a glossy sauce.
- What a liaison meant hereLiaison in period usage covers a binding or enriching addition stirred into a sauce; the butter-and-cream version is a finishing enrichment rather than the main thickening. Do the structural thickening with roux or reduction first; this is the last step before serving.
- Quantities, since none are givenA workable ratio is 2 to 3 tablespoons of softened butter beaten with 2 tablespoons of heavy cream per cup of sauce. Add it in two or three additions, swirling or whisking, and stop when the sauce coats a spoon and looks glossy.
- Butter temperature"Beat the butter and cream together" implies a smooth paste, which works best with butter at cool room temperature. Fridge-hard butter will not take up the cream, and melted butter will not emulsify into the sauce.
- CreamUse heavy or whipping cream. Half-and-half and light cream have more water and less fat and are more likely to break or curdle in an acidic or heavily reduced sauce.
- Off the heatPull the pan from the burner, stir the liaison in, then return it to the lowest possible heat only long enough to warm through. A sauce finished this way should be served within a few minutes; it will not hold on a steam table.
- Salt lastButter and cream both mute seasoning and the added fat dilutes what is already there. Taste and correct salt and acid after the liaison, not before.
Liaison is simply the French kitchen's word for anything that binds a sauce, and by the late nineteenth century it covered a family of finishes: egg yolks with cream, blood in a civet, starch slaked in water, and the plainest of them, cold butter beaten in at the end, a treatment often called monter au beurre. Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name carried this 1896 volume, left entries like this one as terse cross-references rather than recipes with weights. The butter-and-cream version belongs to the era's grand hotel style, in which a velvete or a fish sauce was expected to arrive at the table with a shine on it, and the shine came from fat added at the last possible moment.