No. 175

Thickenings for Soups, Sauces and Stews

Liaisons pour Potages, Sauces et Ragouts

Thickening for Soups.—Put some egg-yolks into a bowl, beat them up with a wooden spoon and dilute with a few spoonfuls of good raw cream; some broth, or cold sauce; pass this through a sieve or tammy, add a dash of grated nutmeg and a few bits of fine butter. Boil well the soup, remove it to one side of the range and mix in the strained thickening; return it to the hot fire, to let cook without ceasing to stir and especially without letting it boil.

For Sauces.—This thickening is composed of egg-yolks beaten and diluted with some cold broth or raw cream. In order to thicken the sauce, it should necessarily be boiling, then remove it from the hot fire and stir a spoonful or more of it into the thickening, then pour the rest of the thickening into the sauce and cook it while stirring over a slow fire, without permitting it to boil. All sauces thickened with eggs must afterward be strained through a tammy.

Thickening or Liaison Prepared Ready to Use.—Twenty-five egg-yolks for one quart of cream; mix well together, pass it through a fine strainer and keep it in a pot in order to thicken sauces and stews as they are needed.

Butter and Cream Thickening.—Incorporate some butter and cream, and just when ready to serve, stir it vigorously (do not heat it again), and serve it at once.

Blood Thickening.—Reserve the blood of poultry or game, adding to it a little vinegar to prevent it from coagulating, then strain it through a sieve and stir in gradually when needed to thicken a sauce.

Arrowroot, Fecula and Cornstarch Thickening.—Dilute one or the other of these with some water, broth or cold milk; strain through a sieve, and pour it into the liquid, stirring it continuously.

Thickening of Kneaded Butter.—Incorporate as much flour into butter as it will absorb to form a soft paste; mix it in small parts in the sauce, stirring constantly until all the butter is melted.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Six separate binding methods on one page, ranging from the still-standard (egg yolk and cream, beurre manié) to the effectively obsolete (blood). Ranhofer assumes a cook who already knows what each is for, so the numbers below fill in what he left out.

The hinge: never let it boilEgg yolks set between roughly 150F and 180F; a liaison breaks into grains at about 185F and no amount of stirring brings it back. Pull the pan at 175-180F, when the sauce coats a spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean track. Cream in the liaison raises the curdling point slightly, which is exactly why it is there.
Proportions, which the original omitsFor soup, count on 3 to 4 yolks and about half a cup of cream per quart. For a sauce, 2 to 3 yolks per cup is normal. The "prepared ready to use" version at 25 yolks per quart of cream works out to roughly 3 yolks per half-cup of the cream.
Do not keep the prepared liaisonRaw yolks beaten into raw cream and "kept in a pot" belonged to a brigade kitchen with an icebox and a turnover measured in hours. Mix only what a service needs, and treat any surplus as you would raw egg: refrigerated, and used the same day.
TemperingThe instruction to stir a spoonful of boiling sauce into the thickening first is not optional politeness. It raises the yolks gradually; dumping cold yolks into hot liquid scrambles them at the point of contact.
TammyA tammy (tamis) is a fine cloth or drum sieve. A chinois or a fine mesh strainer lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same work.
FeculaFecula here most likely means potato starch. It thickens at a lower temperature than cornstarch, sets clearer, and thins out if held hot for long. Arrowroot behaves similarly and tolerates acid better; cornstarch needs a full minute of simmering to lose its raw taste, which conflicts with any sauce already carrying egg.
Kneaded butterBeurre manie is equal weights butter and flour worked to a paste, added in pinches to a simmering sauce. About 1 to 2 tablespoons of each will bind a cup of liquid to nappe consistency. The flour needs a couple of minutes of gentle simmering afterward or the sauce tastes pasty.
Butter and cream thickeningThis is close to monter au beurre: butter beaten into a hot sauce off the heat, held in suspension by agitation alone. The warning not to reheat is the whole method, since the emulsion breaks and the butter pools the moment it is brought back near a simmer.
Blood thickeningPoultry and game blood is not generally sold at retail in the United States and cannot be improvised. If a game recipe calls for it, pig's blood from a butcher is the usual substitute where it is legally available. It thickens by protein coagulation as egg does, so the same rule applies: below a simmer, or it turns to grit.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's summary of thirty-odd years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and this page is pure French professional grammar transplanted whole. Liaison comes from lier, to bind, and the classification here runs egg, starch, butter, blood, kneaded flour. The blood thickening is the entry that dates the book most sharply: it belonged to civet and salmis, the dark game preparations where a hare or a wild duck arrived at the kitchen whole and undressed, and the cook who broke it down naturally had its blood to hand. Ranhofer's placement of these methods in "Elementary Methods," ahead of the recipes proper, tells you how he expected the volume to be read: not as a collection of dishes but as a training manual, in which a young cook learned the binding agents first and only then learned what to bind.