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Liaison of Roux
Place in fryingpan twice as much butter as flour, and then mix together as the butter melts, stirring with a spoon until the flour gets red, but be sure not to let it burn.
Sauces for Fish, Game, Meats, Etc
This is the brown roux that underpins most of the meat and game sauces in the book. Two things matter: the fat-to-flour proportion, and how far you take the color.
- "Twice as much butter as flour"Modern practice is roughly equal weights of fat and flour, or a little more flour than fat. Oscar's ratio is deliberately loose and buttery, which makes a slacker paste that browns evenly without scorching; it also means the finished sauce carries more fat, which you skim off later. If you want a firmer, more predictable thickener, go one part butter to one part flour by weight.
- "Liaison"Here it simply means a binding or thickening agent. Elsewhere in period cookery a liaison is egg yolks and cream stirred into a sauce off the heat; do not confuse the two.
- "Until the flour gets red"This is a brown roux, the color of an old penny. Over medium-low heat in a wide pan it takes 15 to 25 minutes of near-constant stirring. The color comes from the flour toasting, and toasted flour thickens less than pale flour, so a brown roux needs more of it for the same body.
- The point of failureBlack specks mean it has burned, and burnt roux tastes bitter through any amount of stock. There is no rescuing it. Keep the heat lower than you think necessary and never walk away in the last five minutes.
- Pan and toolA heavy skillet or saucier with sloped sides lets you reach every part of the bottom. Use a flat wooden spatula rather than a spoon so you can scrape the corners, and a whisk only once liquid goes in.
- Proportions for a sauceFor a brown sauce, start with roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons of finished roux per cup of hot stock and adjust: this roux is butter-heavy and browned, so it thickens less per spoonful than a pale, equal-parts one. Add the liquid gradually off the heat, whisking smooth between additions, then simmer to cook out any raw-flour taste.
- Keeping itKeeping -- Brown roux holds for weeks covered in the refrigerator and freezes well. A home cook can make a cup at a time and spoon from it as needed.
Roux is the foundation of nineteenth-century French sauce work as codified by Carême and inherited by Escoffier: a pale roux for béchamel and vel outé, a brown one for espagnole and the demi-glace that flavored nearly every meat dish on a grand-hotel menu. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 book, was not a chef, but the recipes he collected reflect the professional kitchen he presided over. An instruction this brief is a standing preparation, assumed knowledge, the thing a cook made before service began. The absence of any measurement beyond a ratio is itself a period marker, addressed to someone who would judge doneness by color and smell rather than by a clock.