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Princess Sauce
Put eighteen chicken quenelles, two truffles cut into slices and one blanched chicken liver cut into dice into a saucepan over the fire with one wineglassful of white wine and permit it to reduce for three or four minutes; then add one tablespoonful of meat-glaze, let it come to a boil and add one pint of good allemande sauce. Toss well together, but do not allow it to cook, and serve it very hot.
This is a finished garnish sauce in the grand-hotel style: the base is made elsewhere, and this page only tells you how to assemble it. Almost everything hinges on heat control at the end.
- Never let it boilAllemande is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison, so once it goes in the pan the sauce must be held below a simmer. The instruction to "toss well together, but do not allow it to cook" is the whole recipe; a boil will scramble the yolks and break the sauce.
- Allemande sauceA chicken or veal velouté enriched with egg yolks and cream and sharpened with lemon. Escoffier reclassified it as a derivative rather than a mother sauce, and it has largely dropped out of modern kitchens, so you will need to make the pint yourself rather than buy it.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it sets to a syrup at room temperature. One tablespoon is a serious dose of salt and gelatin, so taste before adding any further seasoning.
- A wineglassfulRoughly 2 fluid ounces in period American usage, a quarter cup. Reducing it three or four minutes should leave barely a spoonful of concentrated wine.
- Chicken quenellesPoached dumplings of pounded raw chicken bound with egg white and cream, typically shaped between two teaspoons. The recipe's eighteen would have been small ones for a pint of sauce; they should be poached separately in stock before they come near this pan.
- Blanched chicken liverBlanching here means dropping the trimmed liver into simmering stock or water briefly to firm it so it dices cleanly and does not cloud the sauce. Because the finished sauce is never allowed to boil, the blanching is what actually cooks the liver, so take it to firm and cooked through, not pink.
- TrufflesBlack truffle, sliced thin, is what is meant; in period American kitchens these were as often tinned or otherwise preserved as fresh. Tinned truffle peelings or a good preserved truffle are the practical substitutes; truffle oil is not, since the sauce is served hot and the aroma turns harsh.
- Yield and serviceAround a pint and a half once the garnish is in. It is meant to be spooned over poached or braised poultry, sweetbreads, or into vol-au-vent cases, and it must go to the table very hot because the liaison will not stand reheating.
Sauces at the Waldorf in the 1890s were built on Carême's system as it had come down through the Paris kitchens: a base velouté, an egg-yolk liaison to make it allemande, and then a name earned by whatever was folded in at the last moment. Names like princesse belonged to a shared professional vocabulary rather than to any single inventor, and they varied from house to house; in classic garnish tables the word more often points to asparagus tips, so this quenelle-and-truffle version is best read as Oscar Tschirky's own house usage. What the recipe really records is the division of labor in a large hotel brigade, where the saucier had a pint of allemande and a pot of meat-glaze standing ready and the quenelles came from another station, so that the "recipe" is only the final thirty seconds of assembly before the plate went up.