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Poulette Sauce
Put one ounce of flour and a trifle more than one ounce of butter into a stewpan and stir it over the fire for three or four minutes; then pour in gradually one pint of broth and keep on stirring for fifteen minutes. Thicken the sauce with a liaison of yolks of eggs and a small lump of butter, strain it through a fine hair-sieve, season to suit the taste, and serve.
A classic velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, written in the compressed shorthand a professional kitchen of the 1890s expected its readers to fill in. The whole dish turns on the last minute of cooking.
- Never let it boil after the yolks go inOnce the liaison is added the sauce must stay below a simmer, around 180F, or the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains. Pull the pan off the heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce, return them, and cook only until the sauce coats a spoon.
- The weightsOne ounce of flour is a scant quarter cup; "a trifle more than one ounce" of butter is a shade over two tablespoons. The slight excess of fat over flour is deliberate and keeps the roux loose.
- "Broth"Read it as a light white stock, veal or chicken, rather than a browned beef broth; a poulette wants a pale base. Season only at the end, as instructed, since the reduction and the butter concentrate whatever salt is already there.
- Cook the roux paleThree or four minutes over moderate heat is enough to lose the raw-flour taste without colouring it. A poulette should stay ivory; any browning shows in the finished sauce.
- Fifteen minutes of stirringThis is not padding. The long cooking takes the raw edge off the starch and lets the sauce thicken properly. Use a flat wooden spatula and get into the corners of the pan.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve; the modern stand-in is any fine-mesh sieve, chinois included. Press the sauce through with a small ladle rather than pouring it, and strain before the yolks are anywhere near setting.
- Seasoning"To suit the taste" for a poulette conventionally means salt, white pepper, a squeeze of lemon and often chopped parsley added off the heat.
- Yield and holdingAbout a pint, enough for four to six servings. An egg-thickened sauce will not hold on the stove or reheat well, so make it as the dish it dresses comes out of the pot.
Sauce poulette belongs to the family of white sauces built on a velouté and finished with egg yolks — in the classic scheme velouté finished with a yolk liaison and lemon is allemande, and poulette is the derivative made by adding mushroom liquor and parsley. The name means "young hen"; explanations tying it to poultry cookery or to the yolk enrichment itself are folk tradition rather than established fact. In practice nineteenth-century French kitchens poured it over things that needed help: tripe, sheep's trotters, mushrooms, frogs' legs, boiled brains. That Oscar Tschirky includes it here, bare and unattached to any particular dish, tells you how his book was meant to work — a hotel kitchen kept a handful of mother sauces going and drew on them all service long, and the reader was expected to know what to do with a pint of poulette once it was made.