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Maintenon Sauce
Chop fine a slice of lean ham and put it into a saucepan with a sprig of parsley, two mushrooms and two shallots, all finely chopped, one-half tablespoonful of butter, two lumps of sugar and the juice of a lemon, and toss them over the fire for a few minutes. Mix well one tablespoonful of flour with a small quantity of water, then stir in with it gradually one-half pint of stock and mix it in with the other ingredients in the saucepan; season it to taste and continue stirring the sauce over the fire for twenty minutes. Move the saucepan to the side of the fire and thicken the sauce with the beaten yolks of four eggs. When thick the sauce is ready for serving. Maitre d' Hotel Sauce Put one-fourth pound of butter into a saucepan with one-half tablespoonful of chopped parsley, a little finely-mixed thyme and onion, and pepper and salt to taste. Stand the saucepan by the fire, and whisk the contents with an egg whisk until on the point of simmering; then remove the saucepan from the fire, and serve the sauce.
A brown-tinged velouté finished with egg yolks, in the style of the old French kitchen. Two sauces are run together in the original text; the second, Maître d'Hôtel, begins where the sentence about a quarter pound of butter starts.
- The hinge: yolk liaisonOnce the four yolks go in, the sauce must not boil or it will scramble. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce first, then return it to the gentlest heat and stir until it coats a spoon, around 175F.
- "Side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the stovetop. Read it as low heat or off the heat entirely, which is where the liaison is safest.
- Two lumps of sugarRoughly a couple of teaspoons, though the size of a lump was not standardized. With a whole lemon's juice the sauce leans sweet-sour rather than plain velouty.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a pint of stock plus four yolks gives a thick sauce, perhaps a cup or so once the twenty minutes of stirring have reduced it, enough for several portions. Four yolks to that little liquid is generous by modern practice; three will thicken it plainly.
- StrainingNothing here says to strain. If you want a smooth sauce, pass it through a fine sieve before the yolks go in.
- "Lean ham"A slice of dry-cured ham, prosciutto or country ham, not sandwich ham. It is there for salt and savor, so hold back on seasoning until the twenty minutes of stirring are done and the sauce has reduced.
- The flourSlaking flour with cold water rather than cooking a roux leaves a raw, pasty edge unless it simmers properly. The twenty minutes of stirring is what cooks it out; do not shorten it.
- Maître d'Hôtel SauceThis is essentially melted compound butter. Brought only to the point of simmering and whisked, it holds as a loose emulsion for a few minutes; it will split if it sits or reheats. Make it at the moment of service.
Sauce Maintenon takes its name from Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV's second wife, and belongs to the large family of French preparations named for court figures rather than for what is in them — the attribution is culinary tradition, not documented cookery from her household. The technique itself is much older than the restaurant era: a stock-based sauce built on a ham and mushroom base, reduced, then bound at the last moment with egg yolks, the same liaison that finishes a blanquette or a sauce poulette, and one long established in French kitchens well before the nineteenth century. Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, not its chef, and his 1896 book reads as a working compendium of what came out of a large American hotel kitchen run on French lines — dozens of these sauces, set down in dense paragraphs with the assumption that whoever read them already knew how to keep yolks from curdling.