No. 508

Nonpareil Sauce

Sauce Nonpareille

Reduce one pint of veloute (No. 415), with two gills of cream, incorporating in two ounces of fresh butter; strain it through a tammy (No. 159), and set in one ounce of truffles, two ounces of mushrooms, two ounces of cooked egg-whites cut in squares, two tablespoonfuls of chopped coral, one teaspoonful of chopped parsley, one tablespoonful of small capers, and three ounces of red beef tongue or ham cut into three-sixteenths of an inch pieces.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A garnished velouté from Ranhofer's kitchen, built on two cross-references the reader has to chase down. The sauce itself is finished in minutes; nearly all the work is in the base and the diced garnish.

Velouté (No. 415)A blond roux moistened with veal or chicken stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. Ranhofer assumes you have a batch standing by; a pint of well-made chicken velouté is the substitute, not a canned white sauce.
Gills and quantitiesA gill is half a cup, so two gills of cream is one cup. Reducing one pint of velouté with one cup of cream and two ounces of butter gives roughly a pint of finished sauce; the garnish adds something over a cup more.
Tammy (No. 159)A tammy is a loosely woven worsted cloth through which two people wrung the sauce to force it smooth. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a doubled square of muslin, does the same job alone.
CoralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns brick red when heated. Ranhofer does not specify cooked coral, though cooked coral chops more cleanly and gives a more reliable red. Scallop roe is not a close substitute in colour or flavour.
Add the garnish off the heatEverything after the straining is a garnish, not an ingredient to be cooked. Once the butter is incorporated the sauce should be held below a simmer; boiling breaks the emulsion and turns the egg-white dice and coral rubbery and grainy.
The dice sizeThree-sixteenths of an inch is not decorative fussiness. Tongue or ham cut larger reads as chunks of meat rather than as a suspended garnish, and the sauce stops pouring evenly.
Mushrooms and trufflesThe two ounces of mushrooms is presumably cooked button mushrooms, cut to match the tongue. The truffle would be black truffle, sliced or diced; if you are using a tinned product, a few drops of the juice may carry further than an equal weight of the tinned pieces.
ServingThis is a coating sauce for poached poultry, sweetbreads, boiled fish or a vol-au-vent filling. Keep it in a bain-marie, covered, and use it the same service — the garnish weeps and dulls if held overnight.

A Little History

Nonpareille means "without equal," and the word is attached to the tiny sugar pellets and to the small capers listed here, nonpareilles being the smallest grade. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working compendium rather than a book for home cooks, which is why this entry is written as a set of instructions to a brigade that already has velouté in the stockpot and a cook detailed to knife work. Sauces of this type belong to the elaborate garnished-velouté tradition that Carême systematised and Escoffier would shortly prune back; a modern kitchen would call the result a velouté with a lobster-and-tongue garnish and leave it unnamed.