No. 467

French Sauce

Sauce a la Francaise

Reduce one pint of bechamel (No. 409), with two gills of mushroom essence (No. 392) in a saucepan, season with mignonette and nutmeg and half a small clove of crushed and chopped garlic, as well as a tablespoonful of meat glaze. Just when ready to serve incorporate into the sauce four ounces of crawfish butter (No. 573), strain through a tammy, then add a teaspoonful of vinegar and chopped parsley.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A compound sauce in the Delmonico's manner: a béchamel base fortified with mushroom essence and finished with shellfish butter. Nearly all of it is assembly; the technique lies in the last minute.

The hinge: mount the butter off the heatThe crawfish butter goes in "just when ready to serve" because heat above a bare simmer breaks the emulsion and dulls the colour. Pull the pan off the burner, swirl the butter in a piece at a time, and do not let the sauce return to a boil afterward.
Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup (240 ml) of mushroom essence against a pint of bechamel. The recipe gives no target volume; "reduce" here presumably means simmering the two together until the sauce is back to something like its original consistency and coats a spoon.
MignonetteMignonette is coarsely cracked white or mixed peppercorns, not a ground pepper. It is not the shallot-vinegar sauce for oysters, though that sauce takes its name from the same cracked pepper. Crack it fresh in a mortar; the point is scattered bursts of heat rather than even seasoning.
Meat glazeRanhofer's glaze is brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold — glace de viande. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate or a well-reduced homemade veal stock stands in; a bouillon cube does not, being mostly salt.
Mushroom essenceThe cross-referenced essence is mushroom trimmings and stems simmered in stock and strained, reduced to concentrate the flavour. A strong strained infusion of dried and fresh mushrooms gets you to the same place; a pale mushroom broth will disappear into the béchamel.
Crawfish butterShells and trimmings from cooked crawfish pounded with butter, warmed, then strained and chilled. Shrimp or lobster shells give the same effect. Without it this is simply a mushroom béchamel — the butter is what makes the sauce.
TammyA tammy is a fine woollen straining cloth, worked by twisting the sauce through it between two people. A chinois lined with a double layer of damp muslin does the job; press with a ladle rather than forcing it.
Vinegar and parsley lastThe teaspoon of vinegar is a corrective for the richness, added after straining so its sharpness is not cooked off. White wine vinegar suits the sauce better than a dark one.
YieldRoughly a pint of finished sauce, enough for six to eight portions. The recipe itself specifies no accompaniment; a sauce of this composition would suit poached fish, chicken breast or shellfish.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's account of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its hot sauce chapter sets out the French system of foundation sauces and their derivatives for an American professional kitchen. A sauce "a la francaise" in a book written in English by a Frenchman for a New York clientele is less a regional label than a badge of pedigree — the neighbouring entries are named for Flavignan and Gascogne in the same spirit. The construction is thoroughly of its moment: a bechamel base built out with a reduction, tightened with meat glaze, and finished with a compound shellfish butter, a technique for capturing crustacean flavour that long predates Ranhofer and survives today in bisques and in the butters mounted into fish sauces.