No. 515

Parisian Sauce

Sauce Parisienne

To make the essence, cook two ounces of truffle parings in three gills of boiling dry white wine with some parsley, bay leaf, and a small minced shallot, then leave it for half an hour in a high covered saucepan in a bain-marie before draining it over a sieve. Pour this essence into a pint of veloute (No. 415); reduce and add two spoonfuls of meat or chicken glaze (No. 398), a pinch of cayenne, and stir in just when ready to serve two ounces of butter and the juice of a lemon.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic finished velouté, built on a truffle infusion. Nothing here is difficult, but the sauce lives or dies on the last thirty seconds.

Do not boil after the butter goes inThe two ounces of butter and the lemon juice are a monter au beurre finish, whisked in off the heat into a sauce that has stopped simmering. Let it come back to a boil and the emulsion breaks into a greasy sauce with a skin on it.
Three gillsA gill is half a cup, so three gills is one and a half cups of dry white wine. The recipe does not define its 'spoonfuls'; a tablespoon is the usual reading for a glaze measure of this kind.
Truffle paringsThe trimmings left after turning truffles for garnish. Modern substitutes: a half ounce of dried or preserved black truffle plus its juice, or the peelings and stems of fresh truffle if you have them. Truffle oil is not a substitute here, since the infusion is a wine reduction and the oil's aroma is lost the moment it heats.
The bain-marie infusionAfter the wine has cooked, the pan sits covered over hot (not boiling) water for half an hour so the aromatics steep without further reduction. A covered saucepan set in a wide pan of water kept hot but well below a simmer does the job.
Velouté No. 415Ranhofer's velouté is a white roux slackened with veal or chicken stock and cooked down for a long time. Any well-made blond roux sauce on good unsalted stock will serve, but it must be reduced enough to coat a spoon before the essence goes in, or the finished sauce is thin.
Meat or chicken glaze No. 398Stock reduced to a syrup that sets to a firm jelly when cold. Commercial demi-glace or glace de volaille works. Both are salty and the velouté is already reduced, so season at the very end.
StrainingThe recipe calls for the essence to be drained over a sieve; a fine sieve or muslin makes that cleaner. Passing the finished sauce again before mounting the butter is optional insurance.
YieldAround a pint of finished sauce, since the essence goes into a pint of velouté and the whole is then reduced. It suits poached or roast poultry, sweetbreads and delicate fish, and it does not reheat well once buttered.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its long run of hot sauces is essentially the French repertory of the second half of the nineteenth century transplanted whole to Manhattan. Sauces named for a city or region were rarely regional in any strict sense; parisienne in this period tends to signal refinement and expense rather than a particular local tradition, and here that means truffle. The economy of the recipe is worth noticing: it uses parings, the peelings left over from truffles turned into neat shapes for garnish, so a restaurant with a truffle-heavy menu got a second, nearly free sauce out of the waste. The structure is the standard grammar of the era's sauce work, in which a mother sauce is flavoured with an infusion, tightened with glaze and finished with cold butter and acid at the pass, so that a single batch of velouté could be sent out many different ways in the course of one service.