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Villeroy Sauce
Mix an equal quantity of butter and flour together, and stir it over the fire in a saucepan until highly colored; then stir in one pint of either meat or fish broth, a few mushrooms, and a bunch of sweet herbs. Let the broth simmer for fifteen minutes, then strain it through a fine hair-sieve, and boil it until slightly reduced. When ready to serve, thicken the sauce with the volks of two or three eggs.
Oscar gives no weights for the butter and flour, which is normal for a professional book of 1896 — the cook was expected to judge the roux by eye. For one pint of broth, 2 oz (4 tbsp) each of butter and flour gives the thick, clinging sauce this preparation is meant to produce.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inOnce the egg yolks are stirred in, the sauce must not reach a simmer or it will curdle into scrambled egg suspended in gravy. Temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot sauce first, return them off the heat, and bring it back only to about 180F while stirring.
- "Highly colored" rouxThis is a brown roux — cook the butter and flour over medium heat, stirring, for 8 to 12 minutes until it smells nutty and turns the color of peanut butter. Stop short of dark chocolate; past that point the flour loses thickening power and the sauce turns bitter.
- A bunch of sweet herbsPeriod shorthand for what is now called a bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, sometimes with a leek green or celery. Tying it means you can lift it out, though this sauce is strained anyway.
- Fine hair-sieveA sieve of woven horsehair, the standard fine strainer before wire mesh was cheap. A fine-mesh conical strainer (chinois) does the same job; press the solids with a small ladle to extract the flavor.
- BrothUse a well-reduced, unsalted or lightly salted stock matching what the sauce will dress — veal or chicken for meat, fish fumet for fish. Commercial broth is usually salted, and this sauce is simmered and then reduced, so it will concentrate.
- MushroomsThe recipe does not specify a kind; common button mushrooms, or the trimmings and peelings a large kitchen would have had to hand, would suit. Four or five sliced white or cremini mushrooms give the same background savor; they are strained out, not served.
- How thick it should beSauce Villeroy is not a pouring sauce. It is meant to coat cooked sweetbreads, chicken, or fish thickly enough to set firm when chilled, after which the pieces are breaded and fried. Reduce until it heavily coats the back of a spoon.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups finished sauce — enough to coat six to eight portions of chicken or fish for frying, or to sauce four as a plain sauce.
Sauce Villeroy, and the dishes à la Villeroi built on it, are traditionally traced to the Villeroy family of the French court, most often to the 18th-century duc de Villeroy — the sort of aristocratic attribution that attached itself to a good many classical sauces and cannot be documented with any precision. What is certain is its function: by the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf in the 1890s, Villeroy meant a thick egg-enriched sauce built, like allemande, on a roux-thickened velouté finished with yolks, and used as an edible glue. Sweetbreads, chicken wings, or fillets of sole were poached, coated in the sauce, chilled until the coating set, then breaded and deep-fried, so that the sauce arrived hidden inside a crust. Its appearance in a book of Waldorf recipes reflects the kitchen's thoroughly French grammar, and a foundation sauce like this one was assumed knowledge for the cooks who would read it.