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Pompadour Sauce
Put some chopped shallots and mushrooms into a saucepan with a little butter, and sweat them for a few minutes on the fire; then put in one and one-half teacupfuls of turned sauce and two tablespoonfuls of broth, and cook over a slow fire for three-fourths of an hour, keeping it well skimmed. Thicken the sauce with the beaten yolks of three eggs, add one-half teacupful of cream, a little salt and pepper, and stir the whole till quite hot and well mixed. Blanch and chop fine a little parsley, mix it with the sauce, squeeze in a little lemon juice, and serve. The lemon juice may be omitted if it is not relished.
A classical egg-and-cream liaison finish on a velouté base, written for a brigade that already had stock pots going. The whole thing hinges on not letting it boil once the yolks go in.
- Never boil after the yolksOnce the beaten yolks and cream are stirred in, keep the sauce below a simmer — roughly 160-180F. A boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into curds that no amount of whisking will bring back.
- "Turned sauce"This is sauce tournée, the old blond velouté: white stock (veal or chicken) thickened with a pale roux and cooked down until it coats. Any well-made velouté substitutes directly; a can of condensed soup does not.
- TeacupfulNot a standardised measure. Period American books equate it with anything from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so one and a half teacupfuls falls somewhere between roughly 3/4 cup and 1 cup plus a little, and the half teacupful of cream between about 1/4 and 1/3 cup. Treat these as proportions rather than exact volumes.
- Sweating means no colourThe shallots and mushrooms go into butter over low heat until soft and translucent. Browning them puts a nutty, roasted note into what should be a pale ivory sauce.
- The three-quarter hourThat long slow cooking is a reduction and clarification, not a safety step. Skim the scum and butterfat off as it rises — that is what leaves the sauce glossy rather than greasy. Expect the volume to fall noticeably over that time.
- TemperingBeat the yolks with the cream first, then ladle a little hot sauce into them before returning the mixture to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to hot velouté is the usual way this fails.
- Blanching the parsleyThirty seconds in boiling water, then straight into cold, sets the chlorophyll so the parsley stays bright green instead of going olive in a hot sauce. Squeeze it dry before chopping.
- Yield and holdingAbout a cup and a half of finished sauce — enough for four to six portions of poached chicken, veal, or fish. It will not hold on a burner or reheat well; make it as the dish goes out, or keep it warm in a bain-marie for no more than twenty minutes.
Dishes bearing the name Pompadour honour Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV and a fixture of French culinary nomenclature ever since — the label was applied loosely in the nineteenth century to preparations considered rich and courtly rather than to any single fixed formula. What is consistent here is the structure: a velouté enriched with an egg-and-cream liaison, a technique codified in the French repertoire well before Oscar Tschirky put it into print. Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms and published his cook book in 1896, was not himself a chef, and much of the book reads as it does here — a working note taken down from a professional kitchen, assuming the reader already has stock and a mother sauce at hand. Even the lemon juice is left to the cook's discretion, to be omitted "if it is not relished."