No. 512

Sauce a la d'Orleans

Fry lightly in one ounce of butter three chopped shallots; add a tablespoonful of meat glaze (No. 401), and one pint of allemande sauce (No. 407), and incorporate into it half a pound of crawfish butter (No. 573) and a pinch of cayenne pepper; strain through a tammy and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A short entry that depends almost entirely on three other numbered recipes in Ranhofer's book. Everything worth knowing here is in what those cross-references actually are.

Allemande sauceA velouté (blond roux with veal or chicken stock) finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison, reduced and strained. Because of the yolks it must never boil once the liaison is in, or it will curdle and break. One pint is two cups.
Meat glazeRanhofer's No. 401 is stock reduced to a syrupy, near-solid glace de viande. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate stands in; a stock cube does not, being mostly salt.
Crawfish butterCooked crawfish shells and trimmings pounded with butter, melted, strained and chilled. Half a pound to a pint of sauce is a very high proportion by modern habit and gives an intensely rich, coral-coloured sauce; a quarter pound reads as generous today.
Order of operationsThe recipe does not say when or at what heat the crawfish butter goes in. Modern practice would whisk it in off the heat, a little at a time, as a mounting butter, on the reasoning that melted into a hot sauce it can separate and lose the volatile shellfish aroma.
TammyA fine worsted cloth, wrung between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois lined with a doubled square of muslin does the same work; press with a ladle rather than twisting.
ShallotsSweat them in the butter until translucent without colouring — "fry lightly" here means no browning, which would muddy a pale sauce.
YieldComfortably more than the starting pint once the butter is worked in — half a pound of butter is about a cup — enough to sauce six to eight portions of poached sole, turbot or quenelles. It is a fish and shellfish sauce despite the veal-based foundation.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the book is organised exactly as a professional kitchen was: mother sauces with numbers, and dozens of small derivatives like this one built on top of them. Allemande — velouté enriched with egg yolks — was one of the great nineteenth-century foundations, prominent in Carême and Escoffier alike, though Escoffier later argued it should be demoted from mother-sauce status, and it has since largely faded from restaurant use. Names of this kind, conventionally taken to honour the house of Orléans, were part of the era's habit of dedicating garnishes and sauces to royalty, aristocrats and celebrated diners; the attributions rarely record anything more than fashion. The crawfish butter points to the same period's fondness for compound shellfish butters as a way of extracting colour and flavour from shells that would otherwise be discarded — a thrifty technique doing luxurious work.