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Normandy Sauce
To one pint of veloute sauce add two tablespoonfuls of mushroom catsup. Reduce the sauce for ten minutes, and place it in two tablespoonfuls of fish stock. Let it just come to the boil again, then add two yolks of eggs and the juice of half a lemon. Strain through a fine hair-sieve, and stir in one-half ounce of fresh butter. This sauce should be stiff.
A classic egg-yolk liaison built on velouté. Everything about it depends on temperature control at the end.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatOnce the two yolks go in, the sauce must not boil again or it will scramble and break. Pull the pan from the burner, temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce first, then return the pan to the lowest possible heat and stir until it thickens — around 180F is the limit.
- Velouté sauceVeloute sauce -- A pale roux (equal butter and flour, cooked without colouring) moistened with a light stock. The recipe does not say which stock the veloute is made from — it adds fish stock separately — though a fish veloute is what the classical version of this sauce assumes. One pint here means 2 cups.
- Mushroom catsupNot tomato ketchup. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, intensely savoury salted mushroom liquor, still sold in Britain and online. Its function is umami and colour; a splash of mushroom soy or a strong dried-mushroom soaking liquid will stand in, though the salt levels differ.
- "Reduce for ten minutes"A bare simmer, uncovered, stirring often — a flour-thickened sauce scorches on the bottom quickly. Expect to lose perhaps a quarter of the volume.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; use a chinois or a fine-mesh strainer. Straining is not optional in a yolk-finished sauce — it catches any thread of set egg.
- MeasuresHalf an ounce of fresh butter is one tablespoon, stirred in cold at the end for gloss. Do not let it boil after.
- "This sauce should be stiff"Meaning it coats the back of a spoon heavily and holds a line drawn through it — thick enough to nap fish without running off the plate.
- Yield and useAbout a cup and a half of finished sauce, enough for four to six portions of poached sole, turbot or brill. Make it immediately before serving; it reheats badly and breaks easily if warmed above a bare simmer.
Sauce normande is the standard fish-velouté finish of the classical French repertoire, named for Normandy and traditionally associated with the region's cream, butter and shellfish. In Escoffier's codification it is a fish velouté enriched with mushroom and oyster cooking liquor, cream and egg yolks, and it is the sauce that defines sole à la normande. One version substitutes bottled mushroom catsup for the mushroom cooking liquor — a distinctly Anglo-American shortcut, since mushroom ketchup was widely used in English-speaking kitchens before tomato ketchup displaced it. The result is a hotel-kitchen sauce: something close to the structure of the Paris original, assembled from things a large brigade could keep on a shelf.