Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Sauce Veloute
Sauce Veloute
Put an ounce lump of butter into a saucepan, allow it to melt and add two tablespoonfuls of flour, stirring continually and not allowing it to become brown; then add a pint of chicken stock, very strong, put in some garnishes, half a cupful of the liquor of mushrooms, half a dozen whole peppers, half a pinch of salt, together with a small quantity of nutmeg. Let boil, the while stirring, for twenty minutes, then move to the side of the fire and skim well, allowing it to simmer slowly for an hour, after which rub it through a fine sieve.
A blond roux velouté in the classical manner. The whole point is the long, slow, skimmed simmer, which is where the raw flour taste and the scum of loose starch and albumen leave the sauce.
- The hinge: don't rush the simmerThe twenty-minute boil is not the sauce. Pulling the pan half off the heat so it simmers on one side only drives the scum to the cool edge, where you skim it off repeatedly over the hour. Skip that and you get a pasty, cloudy sauce.
- Quantities in modern terms1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons; a pint here is 2 cups of stock, plus the half cupful of mushroom liquor. That is a fairly loose roux, and it is meant to be; an hour of slow simmering will reduce it appreciably, though the recipe gives no finished quantity.
- "Not allowing it to become brown"Cook the roux only briefly, until it smells faintly of biscuits and looks pale straw. Any real colour and you are heading towards a blond or brown sauce instead, and the flour also loses thickening power as it darkens.
- "Some garnishes"Almost certainly shorthand for aromatic trimmings: parsley stems, a bay leaf, thyme, a little onion or leek, mushroom trimmings. The recipe does not say. A small bundle is enough; the sieve removes it all.
- Whole peppersWhole black peppercorns, half a dozen, added for perfume rather than heat and strained out. Ground pepper would cloud the sauce and turn it grey.
- Mushroom liquorThe strained cooking liquid from poached or sautéed mushrooms, a standing by-product in a hotel kitchen. Soaking dried mushrooms and straining the soaking water carefully off the grit gives a comparable result; canned mushroom liquid is saltier and thinner.
- StrainingA fine sieve: a conical strainer or a tammy cloth both answer. Press the sauce through firmly, then wipe the underside of the sieve into the sauce.
- Salt at the end"Half a pinch" is very little for this volume, which suggests a stock already carrying some seasoning of its own, or simply an expectation of adjusting later. Season after straining, once the sauce has concentrated, not before.
- Holding itButter the surface or press plastic against it to stop a skin forming. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and is the base for allemande, suprême and poulette; on its own it wants a squeeze of lemon before serving.
Velouté — "velvety" — is one of the mother sauces Antonin Carême set at the head of French sauce-making in the early nineteenth century, and Escoffier kept it there when he reorganised the repertoire at the Savoy and the Carlton. It is simply a blond roux moistened with a white stock rather than milk, which is what separates it from béchamel, and the version here, built on strong chicken stock with mushroom liquor, is the everyday velouté of a hotel saucier's day: made in quantity each morning, held on the corner of the stove, and turned into a dozen finished sauces by additions of cream, egg yolk, herbs or wine. Oscar Tschirky, who was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, compiled the 1896 book largely from the kitchen's working practice, and its presence there shows what an American grand hotel of the 1890s took for granted: French method, French vocabulary, and a stockpot going at all hours.