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Supreme Sauce
Mix with one pint of white sauce three chopped mushrooms, the juice of half a lemon, and one ounce of butter; stir over the fire while boiling for ten minutes. Strain the sauce through a fine hair-sieve, and use it when required.
A one-line professional note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a quart-jar of white sauce in the kitchen and simply tells you what to do to a pint of it. A few points fill in the gaps.
- The white sauce baseOne pint is 2 cups. In a period hotel kitchen this would most likely have been a flour-and-butter roux moistened with veal or chicken stock (velout he the recipe does not specify. For a sauce called supr he a chicken-stock velout he is the usual classical base, though the recipe itself calls for no cream.
- Add the butter off the heatBoiling the ounce of butter into the sauce for ten minutes, as written, risks letting it separate and float. Whisking it in cold, in pieces, once the sauce is off the fire thickens the sauce slightly and gives a better gloss.
- Lemon lastLong boiling dulls the brightness that is the point of the lemon, and acid held at a boil can thin a starch-thickened sauce. Stirring the juice in at the end, then tasting before adding more, is the safer course.
- Ten minutes is for the mushroomsThe simmer exists to draw flavour out of the raw chopped mushrooms, since they are strained out and discarded. Keep it to a bare simmer and stir; a hard boil on a floured sauce scorches at the bottom of the pan.
- Hair-sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, one of the fine strainers of the period (tammy cloth was also used for sauces). A chinois or a fine-mesh conical sieve does the same job; press the mushrooms firmly to get the liquid out of them.
- MushroomsThree mushrooms presumably means cultivated button mushrooms; the recipe gives no weight. Trimmings and stems work as well as caps here, since nothing survives the sieve.
- Yield and useAbout 2 cups. It is a coating sauce for poached or roasted poultry, sweetbreads, eggs and vol-au-vents; keep it warm in a covered pan over water rather than on direct heat, and thin with a spoonful of stock if it sets up.
Sauce suprême is one of the small classical derivatives of velouté, and its name is the ordinary French superlative applied to sauces: the "supreme" version of a white sauce, richer and finer than the working velouté it starts from. It is often said to travel with the other sense of the word, the suprême of poultry, the breast fillet, which the sauce is traditionally associated with napping. Oscar Tschirky's book is written from inside a hotel kitchen that produced sauces by the gallon, which is why the entry reads as a variation rather than a recipe: the white sauce, the stock and the roux were standing preparations, and a cook needed only the ratio and the finish. The instruction to strain out the mushrooms after ten minutes suggests, at least to my reading, the period's attitude to a fine white sauce: that flavour was wanted but no visible texture, and that a sauce should be smooth, pale and glossy above all.