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Valois Sauce
Chop two shallots, put them into a saucepan with a wineglassful of vinegar and boil them until the moisture has entirely evaporated; then leave it until cold. Add the beaten yolks of five eggs and one tablespoonful of butter, and stir all over the fire for two or three minutes. Take the saucepan off the fire, put in another tablespoonful of butter and stir over the fire again. Add an ounce of chicken glaze cut into small pieces, another tablespoonful of butter, and mix thoroughly off the fire. Place the saucepan on the fire, put in one tablespoonful each of butter and chopped parsley, and when well mixed serve
This is a warm egg-yolk emulsion in the béarnaise family, enriched with meat glaze. It lives or dies on heat control, and Oscar's stove-top instructions assume a cook who knows to keep the pan moving and off the flame more than on it.
- The hinge: gentle heatEgg yolks begin to set well below the boil, somewhere in the 150-180F range depending on how much liquid is with them, and a bare saucepan over direct flame gets there in seconds. Work in a bowl or pan set over barely simmering water, or lift the pan on and off the burner as the text keeps telling you to, and stop while the sauce still flows.
- A wineglassfulRoughly 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. It is all going to evaporate anyway, so precision matters less than reducing until the pan is dry but not scorched, then letting it cool before the yolks go in.
- Chicken glazeGlace de volaille: chicken stock reduced to a sticky, sliceable jelly. An ounce is about two tablespoons. Commercial demi-glace or a good concentrated stock paste stands in; a bouillon cube does not, being mostly salt.
- The butter is lightFour tablespoons across five yolks is lean for this style of sauce, and the result will be closer to a thick savoury custard than to a pourable hollandaise. Up to eight tablespoons, added in the same piecemeal fashion, gives a richer, more pourable result.
- Shallots in or outClassic versions of this sauce are strained, though usually after the sauce is finished rather than before the yolks go in. Oscar leaves the shallots in, which gives a coarser sauce; either is defensible, but decide before you add the eggs.
- Parsley, not tarragonA Valois is usually built on a tarragon-and-chervil béarnaise base. Oscar reduces plain vinegar and finishes with parsley, which makes this a plainer, meatier sauce. Add tarragon to the vinegar reduction if you want the standard version.
- Holding and yieldMakes roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for four small portions. It will not reheat; keep it barely warm, near 140F, and whisk in a spoonful of warm water if it begins to tighten or separate.
- Raw-egg noteThe yolks here are warmed but never brought to a temperature that would reliably pasteurise them. Pasteurised yolks are worth using if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
Sauce Valois is the meat-glaze version of béarnaise, and is generally treated as identical to sauce Foyot, the name usually traced to the Paris restaurant Foyot near the Luxembourg palace; Valois itself invokes the French royal house, part of the nineteenth-century habit of naming compound sauces after dynasties, diplomats and streets. Escoffier codified the family as béarnaise plus dissolved glace de viande, served with grilled meats, and Oscar Tschirky — maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, never a chef, but the man whose name went on the 1896 cookbook — gives a version that substitutes chicken glaze for beef and parsley for tarragon. The presence of glace de volaille at all tells you what kind of kitchen this was: one with stockpots running and cold reduced stock on hand.