No. 434

Berchoux Sauce

Sauce a la Berchoux

Put into a sautoire one pint of milk and let boil, then add two ounces of fresh bread-crumbs; season with salt, nutmeg, and red pepper and moisten with the quarter of a bottleful of champagne. Now pound a pinch of tarragon with two pinches of chervil, and a quarter of a clove of garlic; when it becomes a pulp add four ounces of fresh butter and a little spinach green to color. Incorporate this butter into the sauce, strain through a fine tammy; if the sauce should be too thick add a little cream.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A bread sauce enriched with herb butter and lifted with champagne — essentially the English bread sauce of the period pushed into French dress. Two things decide whether it works: the crumbs must swell fully before the butter goes in, and the sauce must not boil once it does.

SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan with a lid, roughly what we would call a sauté pan or sauteuse. Any wide saucepan of about 2 quarts serves; the width helps the crumbs swell evenly.
Fresh bread-crumbsNot dried crumbs from a canister. Ranhofer means soft crumb from the interior of a day-old white loaf, torn or rubbed by hand. Two ounces is about a cup, loosely packed; dried crumbs will absorb differently and give a pasty sauce.
A quarter of a bottleful of champagneAbout 6 fl oz from a standard 750 ml bottle. Any dry sparkling wine works — the bubbles are irrelevant by the time it hits hot milk, but the acidity is not, so avoid anything off-dry.
Red pepperCayenne, used as a seasoning pinch rather than for heat. In The Epicurean "red pepper" generally means cayenne rather than paprika or chile flake.
Spinach greenRanhofer's vert d'épinards: blanched spinach pounded and pressed, the juice heated gently until the green solids coagulate, then strained off and used as a dye. A teaspoon of very finely puréed blanched spinach, or a drop of blanched-herb purée, gets you the same colour. It contributes almost no flavour and is there purely for the pale green.
The butter goes in off the heatFour ounces of butter worked into a hot milk base will break if the sauce is allowed to boil. Pull the pan off the flame, beat the herb butter in a piece at a time, and hold the finished sauce below a simmer.
TammyA tammy cloth is a fine worsted straining cloth, twisted between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a fine sieve followed by a brief blitz with a stick blender, does the job.
GarlicA quarter clove is not a typo. This is a nineteenth-century French kitchen using garlic as a background note; a whole clove will dominate the tarragon and chervil.
YieldAbout a pint and a half of finished sauce, enough for eight to ten portions. It suits poached chicken, veal, or white fish. It does not reheat well — the crumbs continue to swell and the butter separates.

A Little History

The name honours Joseph Berchoux, the French lawyer and versifier whose mock-didactic poem La Gastronomie, ou l'Homme des champs à table appeared in 1801 and is generally credited with putting the word gastronomie into wide French circulation. Naming sauces after literary men was standard practice in the grand-restaurant repertoire — Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the record of his decades at Delmonico's in New York, is thick with dishes titled for writers, singers, financiers and patrons. The sauce itself is a curious hybrid: the milk-and-crumb foundation is close to the English bread sauce served with game birds, while the pounded herb butter and the splash of champagne are pure Parisian finishing. That combination is very much the Delmonico's idiom, where an American clientele expected French luxury and Ranhofer supplied it by dressing homely bases in wine and green butter.