No. 525

Pompadour Sauce

Sauce Pompadour

Fry lightly in two ounces of butter two finely chopped shallots, do not let them color; add to them four ounces of minced mushrooms; stir with a spoon until they have exhausted all their moisture; now pour in five gills of veloute (No. 415) and let the whole boil, with three gills of veal blond (No. 423), despumating it well. Thicken the sauce with six raw egg-yolks diluted in a gill of cream, add two ounces of butter, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, also a spoonful of chopped and blanched parsley.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French compound sauce from Ranhofer's Delmonico kitchen: mushroom-shallot base, velouté, veal stock, finished with a yolk liaison. The finish is the whole game.

The hinge: the liaisonOnce the six yolks and cream go in, the sauce must not boil. Pull the pan from direct heat, temper the yolks with a ladle of hot sauce first, then return everything over low heat and stir until it coats a spoon — roughly 175-180F. A single boil and the yolks curdle into grains no straining will fix.
GillsA gill is half a cup. Five gills of velouté is 2½ cups, three gills of veal blond is 1½ cups, and the gill of cream for the yolks is ½ cup. The velouté and blond together make a quart before reduction, with the cream on top of that; the finished sauce will be somewhat less.
Velouté (No. 415)Ranhofer's velouté is a white roux moistened with white stock (chicken or veal) and long-simmered. A modern approximation is about 2½ cups of good unsalted white stock thickened with a blond roux of 2 tbsp each butter and flour, simmered and strained.
Veal blond (No. 423)Not a brown stock. Veal blond is veal bones and trimmings cooked only to a pale gold, giving body and savour without colour. Substitute a light, unsalted veal or chicken stock, reduced a little for gelatin; avoid anything roasted dark, which would muddy the sauce.
DespumatingSkimming. As the sauce simmers, protein scum and butterfat rise; lift them off repeatedly. This is what keeps the sauce clear-tasting and glossy.
The mushroom duxelles"Until they have exhausted all their moisture" means cooking the minced mushrooms until the pan is dry and they begin to squeak against the spoon. Rushing this stage waters the sauce and dulls it. Keep the shallots pale; browning them puts the sauce out of key.
Blanched parsleyParsley dropped into boiling water for 15 seconds, refreshed in cold water and squeezed dry, then chopped. It keeps its green in the hot sauce instead of turning drab, and loses the raw edge.
ServingAbout 3 cups, enough for eight to ten portions. It belongs with poached or roast white meats — chicken, veal, sweetbreads — and, being yolk-bound, will not hold or reheat. Make it at the last moment and keep it warm in a bain-marie below 180F.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of the restaurant's repertoire — nearly 3,500 numbered recipes cross-referenced to one another, which is why this sauce sends you off to No. 415 and No. 423 rather than repeating itself. The name honours Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, whose name was attached in the nineteenth century to a long list of rich, pale, refined preparations; the attribution is culinary flattery rather than history, and there is no evidence she or her kitchen had anything to do with the sauce. Structurally it is a velouté enriched twice over, with a duxelles for depth and an egg-and-cream liaison for the final unction — the kind of layered, labour-heavy construction that a brigade of cooks made possible and that largely disappeared from restaurant kitchens after the First World War.