Cream Sauce

A three-line sauce that depends entirely on technique: reduce, then mount with butter off the heat. Ranhofer assumes you already have a pint of his béchamel (No. 409) standing by.

• The measurementsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. That gives a pint of bechamel plus a cup of cream plus 4 oz butter going into the pan; how much finished sauce you end up with depends entirely on how far you take the reduction, which Ranhofer does not specify.
• The hinge: butter off the heatButter off the heat -- Ranhofer says only to 'incorporate' the butter. Standard practice is to pull the pan from the burner first and work the butter in cold and in pieces, since boiling after the butter goes in can break the emulsion and leave the sauce greasy rather than glossy.
• What Ranhofer's béchamel isWhat Ranhofer's bechamel is -- Nineteenth-century bechamel was frequently richer than the plain milk-and-roux sauce of modern usage, often enriched with veal or white stock. Read No. 409 before assuming a modern bechamel will match it; if the base tastes thin, fortifying the milk with white stock will bring it closer.
• "Fresh butter"Nineteenth-century recipes distinguish fresh from salted butter because butter was commonly salted for keeping. Use unsalted, and season at the very end once the reduction has concentrated whatever salt was already in the base.
• Reduce with intent"Reduce it with two gills of cream" means add the cream and cook the whole down until it coats a spoon heavily. Do this over moderate heat with a spatula on the pan bottom, since a roux-based sauce scorches easily.
• CayenneA dash means enough to sharpen the finish without registering as heat. Note that Ranhofer seasons last, after the butter is in, not during the reduction.
• Holding and servingKeep it in a bain-marie below a simmer and press plastic or a butter film onto the surface to stop a skin forming. It is a coating sauce for poached poultry, sweetbreads, eggs, or boiled vegetables, and it does not reheat well once broken.