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Victoria Sauce
Pound one tablespoonful of lobster coral very fine with one-half ounce of fresh butter and set it one side. In three-fourths pint of allemande sauce place one-half wineglassful of white wine and half a dozen chopped mushrooms, let it warm well without boiling in a saucepan, and then mix in the lobster coral. Stir well, and serve.
A classic French compound sauce built on another sauce, so most of the work happens before this recipe starts. The whole thing turns on heat control.
- The hinge: never let it boilAllemande is a velouté finished with egg yolk and cream. Once the coral butter goes in, keep it below a bare simmer or the yolks will scramble and the sauce will break into grains. Warm it in a heavy pan off direct high heat, stirring, and pull it as soon as it is hot through.
- Allemande sauceA white veal or chicken velouté (blond roux plus light stock) thickened with an egg-yolk-and-cream liaison and sharpened with lemon. It is rarely listed by name now; you will need to make it first, or substitute a well-reduced velouté finished with two yolks beaten into a few tablespoons of cream per 1 1/2 cups.
- MeasuresThree-fourths pint is 1 1/2 cups. A wineglassful was conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half is roughly 2 tablespoons — a small splash, not a slug.
- Lobster coralThe coral is the dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral-red on cooking; it supplies the colour of the sauce. Only hen lobsters carry it, and supermarket lobster is often sold already cooked, so it may need to be ordered from a fishmonger. Paprika or tomato paste will give colour but not the flavour.
- Coral butterPounding the raw coral with butter and passing it through a fine sieve is worth the trouble; unsieved coral leaves granules. Work it cold, keep it cold, and add it in small pieces at the end so it emulsifies rather than melts out.
- The mushroomsChopped raw mushrooms dropped into a sauce that is never allowed to boil will stay largely raw and shed water. Sweat them in a little butter until dry first, then add. Half a dozen button mushrooms is roughly 2–3 oz.
- WineAdd the white wine to the sauce and let it warm through so the raw edge cooks off before the coral butter goes in — after that point you cannot raise the heat to reduce anything.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough for six. Sauces of this type were generally served with poached or boiled fish, chicken breast or sweetbreads, though the recipe does not say. It does not reheat well: serve it as soon as it is made.
Victoria sauce belongs to the long roster of nineteenth-century French sauces named for royalty and celebrities; the name is usually taken to refer to Queen Victoria, though the attribution is not documented. Its structure follows classical practice: a mother sauce (velouté), a small sauce derived from it (allemande, later demoted from the rank of leading sauce as egg-yolk liaisons fell out of fashion), and then a finishing compound butter to give a distinct name and colour. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 records the Waldorf's working repertoire, and a sauce like this one assumes a cook already has velouté standing by — the kind of division of labour a large hotel kitchen depended on. Coral butter was one way to get red into a white sauce before tomato paste was a kitchen staple, and it cost little in a house that broke down lobsters daily.