No. 504

Sauce a la Mornay

After reducing a good bechamel sauce (No. 409), stir into it incessantly a few spoonfuls of mushroom sauce (No. 392) and some raw cream, also essence of fish (No. 388), should this sauce be needed for fish; but if otherwise then use a few spoonfuls of good chicken stock (No. 195) reduced to a half-glaze. When the sauce becomes succulent and creamy, pour it into a small saucepan, beat it smooth while heating it, and finish it off of the fire with some butter and grated parmesan cheese. This sauce is used for dishes that are bread-crumbed and for meats baked by a salamander. Its delicacy forbids it being boiled.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional kitchen with a stocked larder, so this reads as a set of cross-references rather than a recipe. The proportions are left to judgement; the technique is not.

Never let it boilThe closing line is the whole recipe: cheese and cream in a reduced béchamel will break and go grainy if it simmers. Add the parmesan off the heat and stir until it melts in the residual warmth.
The baseA "good bechamel" here means a white roux sauce built on milk with aromatics, then reduced until it coats a spoon heavily. Reduce before enriching, not after, or the added cream and cheese will thin it back out.
Essence of fishRanhofer's No. 388 is a concentrated fish essence made from fish trimmings. A couple of spoonfuls of well-reduced fumet does the work of the original.
Half-glazeChicken stock 'reduced to a half-glaze' is stock boiled down until syrupy and just short of glace. Use it by the spoonful; reduction concentrates whatever salt the stock already carries, so season the finished sauce last.
Mushroom sauceNo. 392 is a separate preparation. Well-reduced mushroom cooking liquor, or a small quantity of duxelles pressed through a sieve, gives the same savoury depth without building a second sauce.
SalamanderIn 1894 this could mean either the overhead gas broiler of a professional range or the older iron plate heated red and held over the dish. A domestic broiler set high is the equivalent; the sauce should glaze and spot brown in a minute or two.
ParmesanGrate it finely from a block. Pre-grated cheese carries anti-caking starch that will make the sauce chalky, and the powdered tinned sort will not melt cleanly at low heat.
QuantityNo yield is given. As a guide, a cup of reduced béchamel finished with a couple of tablespoons of cream, an ounce of butter and an ounce of cheese will nap four portions of fish or gratinated meat.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that house's repertoire, which is why the sauce chapter reads as a numbered system of cross-references rather than a set of standalone recipes. Mornay is a cheese-finished b o traced to the Mornay family or, in another common telling, to Philippe de Mornay, the sixteenth-century Huguenot statesman; neither attribution is documented, and the sauce as we know it belongs to nineteenth-century French cooking rather than to the Renaissance. What is notable in Ranhofer's version is how little cheese defines it: the sauce is built on mushroom essence and either fish fumet or reduced chicken stock, with the parmesan added last as a finish. It exists chiefly to be browned under the salamander.