No. 527
Poulette Sauce
Sauce a la Poulette
A classic egg-and-cream liaison built on velouté, and the whole thing turns on temperature control at the moment the yolks go in. Ranhofer assumes you already have a finished velouté on hand (his No. 415, a white roux cooked with veal or chicken stock and strained).
- The hinge: never boil after the yolksBring the velouté to a boil before the liaison goes in, then pull it off the heat, temper a ladle of hot sauce into the yolk-and-cream mixture, and return it while stirring. Take it back to no more than about 180F/82C, thick enough to coat a spoon; a true boil scrambles the yolks and the sauce breaks into grains that no amount of whisking will recover.
- A pint of veloutéSixteen fluid ounces, roughly 2 cups. Four yolks to a pint is a rich liaison by modern standards and will thicken firmly; three is enough if you want a pouring sauce.
- "A little cream"Unspecified in the original. Two to three tablespoons of heavy cream is enough to loosen the yolks so they disperse without lumping.
- Butter at the last momentTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons, about 55 g. Add it cold and in pieces, off the heat, swirling rather than whisking hard. The butter is for gloss and body, not for cooking, and it will separate if the pan goes back on a flame.
- Lemon last, and for a reasonAcid added to hot dairy and egg encourages curdling, so the juice goes in after the heat is off and the butter is absorbed. One small lemon is plenty for a pint; taste as you go, since velouté made from a reduced stock is already assertive.
- If it does splitA liaison that has gone slightly grainy can sometimes be rescued by straining through a fine chinois and whisking in a spoonful of cold cream. Fully scrambled yolks cannot be saved.
- Yield and useAbout 2 to 2 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings. Poulette is the standard sauce for poached chicken, veal, brains and sweetbreads, mussels, and above all for boiled or braised mushrooms and young vegetables.
- Holding itKeep it warm in a bain-marie below a simmer with a film of butter or a round of parchment on the surface. Direct heat or a long hold will scramble it; it does not reheat well the next day.
The name is generally traced to poulet, chicken, and the sauce originally belonged to fricassees of chicken finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, though by the nineteenth century it had detached from the bird entirely and become the standard white sauce for anything poached and pale, notably mushrooms a la poulette and tripes a la poulette. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for about three decades, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopedic record of that kitchen, and its sauce section follows the classical French system of building nearly everything from a handful of mother sauces: here velouté does the work, and the cook only has to finish it. The liaison itself is much older than the name, a medieval and early modern technique for thickening broths with beaten yolks that survived into haute cuisine long after roux had taken over most of the job.