No. 442

Cardinal Sauce, Fat and Lean

Sauce Cardinal en Gras et en Maigre

For Fat.—Reduce one pint of veloute (No. 415), with two gills of mushroom essence (No. 392), or else veal blond (No. 423), season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg; add a tablespoonful of meat, chicken, or game glaze (No. 401), two ounces of fresh butter, and the juice of one lemon. Serve in a sauce-boat, and dredge over the top chopped-up lobster coral.

For Lean.—Soak six carp milts in cold water, cook them for ten minutes in white broth (No. 195) with the juice of one lemon, salt, and half an ounce of fine butter, then drain; put into a saucepan six tablespoonfuls of thick bechamel (No. 409), add to it a gill of cream; boil, season with salt and cayenne pepper, and beat in one ounce of fresh butter, strain through a tammy, add the milts, and heat them up rolling them in the sauce. Serve in a sauce-boat, dredging the top with some very finely chopped lobster coral.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two versions of the same sauce: one built on a meat-based velouté, the other on béchamel for fast days. Both depend on component recipes numbered elsewhere in The Epicurean, so read the whole chain before starting.

Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup and a pint is two cups. The fat version therefore starts from about three cups of liquid, though the recipe does not say how far to reduce it.
Velouté, veal blond, glazeVelouté (No. 415) is a white roux sauce moistened with veal or chicken stock. Veal blond (No. 423) is a pale veal stock, and glaze (No. 401) is stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold — a tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate stands in acceptably.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, twisted between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois or a doubled square of muslin does the same work with less drama.
Carp miltMilt is the soft roe — the sperm sac — of a male fish, sold as laitance in French markets and hard to find at a modern fish counter. Herring or shad milt is the nearest substitute; six pieces is a generous garnish for the roughly one cup of sauce the lean version makes.
Ten minutes is the outer limitMilt sets almost on contact with hot broth and turns grainy if pushed. Poach it gently below a simmer, and when it goes back into the finished sauce only roll it warm — do not let the sauce boil again.
Lobster coralCoral is the roe of a female lobster, black-green when raw and scarlet once cooked. Take it from a cooked lobster, dry it briefly in a low oven or press it through a sieve, then dredge it over the sauce at the last moment; here it supplies the cardinal red at the surface rather than colouring the sauce through.
Butter goes in off the heatThe final two ounces in the fat version and one ounce in the lean are a mounting, not a cooking fat. Add it in pieces with the pan off the burner and swirl, or the emulsion breaks and the sauce looks oily.
Lemon lastAcid added to a cream- or velouté-based sauce over direct heat encourages curdling. Stir in the lemon juice after the butter, when the sauce is no longer near boiling.

A Little History

En gras and en maigre — fat and lean — is a long-standing organizing distinction in French cookery, dividing dishes permitted on ordinary days from those allowed on the fast days of the church calendar, when meat stock was forbidden but fish and dairy were not. That is why Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), gives the same sauce twice: once on velouté and veal stock, once on béchamel and cream with fish milt in place of meat glaze. The name is generally traced to the red of a cardinal's robes, supplied here by lobster coral, and by the late nineteenth century a cardinal sauce was often served with poached fish. Ranhofer's cross-references — velouté at No. 415, mushroom essence at No. 392, glaze at No. 401 — suggest something of how a professional kitchen of the period worked, with the sauce cook drawing on a standing larder of reductions built up over days.