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Recipes: Sauce
No. 2. Veluté Sauce The same as above, but use white stock, no beef, and only pheasant or fowl trimmings, button mushrooms, cream instead of glaze, and a chopped shallot.
G No. 3. Béchamel Sauce Ingredients: Butter, ham, veal, carrots, shallot, celery, bay leaf, cloves, thyme, peppercorns, potato flour, cream, fowl stock. a Prepare a mirepoix by mixing two ounces of butter, trimmings of lean veal and ham, a carrot, a shallot, a little celery, all cut into dice, a bay leaf, two cloves, four peppercorns, and a little thyme. Put this on a moderate fire so as not to let it colour, and when all the moisture is absorbed add a tablespoonful of potato flour.
Mix well, and gradually add equal quantities of cream and fowl stock, and stir till it boils. Then let it simmer gently. Stir occasionally, and if it gets too thick, add more cream and white stock. After two hours pass it twice slowly through a tamis so as to get the sauce very smooth.
Two sauces in the classical French manner, written for a kitchen that already knew what it was doing. The Béchamel here is the old rich version built on a meat mirepoix, not the plain milk-and-flour sauce the name now implies.
- No. 2 depends on the recipe before it"The same as above" refers to a preceding sauce that is not reproduced here, presumably a brown sauce of the Espagnole type, since the changes called for are white stock in place of brown, poultry or game trimmings in place of beef, and cream in place of meat glaze. Read the velouté as a set of substitutions rather than as a standalone method.
- This is not modern béchamelToday the name means milk thickened with a white roux. The version given is closer to what later cooks would call a velouté or a sauce suprême: fowl stock and cream thickened with starch and infused with ham, veal and aromatics. Expect a savoury, meaty sauce, not a neutral white one.
- Potato flourPotato starch, sold as potato starch or fécule. A tablespoon is a light thickening for the quantity of liquid implied; it thickens on contact with boiling liquid and can slacken again with long cooking. The recipe's instruction to add more cream and stock is for when the sauce gets too thick as it reduces. Cornstarch behaves similarly; wheat flour will not, as it needs cooking out.
- Mirepoix, older senseHere the mirepoix includes lean veal and ham, which a modern mirepoix does not. That meat is the backbone of the flavour. Cut everything small and even so it gives up its moisture at the same rate.
- "A moderate fire so as not to let it colour"Medium-low, around a bare sizzle. The instruction is the hinge of the recipe: any browning of the butter, ham or vegetables tints the finished sauce and pushes it toward an Espagnole. Stir and lower the heat rather than hurrying it.
- Two hours of simmeringGenuinely needed to draw flavour from the veal and ham, but keep it at a bare tremble and stir up from the bottom regularly. A boiling white sauce with cream in it will catch and speck.
- TamisA drum sieve — a fine mesh stretched in a shallow wooden hoop, worked with a scraper. A fine chinois pressed hard, or a conical strainer followed by a pass through muslin, gives much the same result. The direction to pass it "twice slowly" is aimed at getting the sauce very smooth, as the recipe says.
- No quantities for the liquidThe original gives none, only "equal quantities of cream and fowl stock." A tablespoon of potato starch is a light bind for something on the order of a pint of liquid; judge by eye, since the recipe expects you to add more cream and white stock if it thickens too much over the two hours.
Béchamel is traditionally named for Louis de Béchameil, a financier and steward of the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is a courtly compliment rather than a claim that he invented anything; sauces of pounded meat and cream predate him. By the nineteenth century Carême had organised French sauce-making into a small family of mother sauces — espagnole, velouté, béchamel and allemande — from which everything else was derived, and it is that scheme the numbered entries here follow. What is striking is how meaty this béchamel still is: the retreat to plain milk and roux, familiar from twentieth-century cookery, had not yet happened in a professional kitchen. The Cook's Decameron was framed as an argument for Italian cooking against the English habit of the day.