No. 528
Princess Sauce
Sauce a la Princesse
A compound béchamel of the classic Delmonico kitchen: a mother sauce enriched with meat glaze, cream, butter and acid at the last moment. It is quick once the two cross-referenced preparations are in hand.
- The hinge: mount off the heatThe four ounces of butter, the parsley and the lemon go in "just when ready to serve" for a reason. Once butter is whisked into a hot sauce it will break if the sauce boils, and the lemon juice will curdle cream held at a simmer. Pull the pan to the side, whisk in cold butter a piece at a time, then the parsley and juice, and send it out.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. Ranhofer uses the term throughout for cream and wine measures.
- Chicken glaze (No. 398)Glace de volaille: chicken stock reduced until it sets to a firm, syrupy jelly at room temperature. Two tablespoons of it carries most of the savour here. A good commercial chicken demi-glace or glace works; ordinary canned broth does not, and a bouillon cube gives salt without body.
- Béchamel of the periodBéchamel of the period — No. 409 is Ranhofer's béchamel, a milk-and-white-roux sauce; period béchamels were often richer and more heavily seasoned than a plain modern one. Make roughly a pint of a medium béchamel, well seasoned and strained, and expect the finished sauce to thin considerably once cream and butter go in.
- Butter quantityButter quantity — Four ounces is one American stick, about 115 g, going into roughly a pint and a half of sauce. It is a great deal of butter, and it means the sauce cannot be reheated hard or held for long.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and add it early, with the cream, so it has a minute to bloom. Pre-ground nutmeg in the quantity implied here will taste dusty.
- Yield and useYield and use — About three cups, enough for eight to ten portions as a coating sauce. The recipe names no accompaniment; a sauce of this type would suit poached chicken breasts, sweetbreads, veal, poached eggs or asparagus, and it is best made to order rather than held.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is essentially the Carême-derived French repertoire transplanted to an American kitchen, with derivative sauces often cross-referenced back to their mother sauce by number. Dishes and sauces styled à la princesse appear across nineteenth-century French cookery without any single princess reliably attached to them; the label generally signals a pale, delicate, cream-and-butter treatment, often paired with asparagus tips or poached white meat, in the same family of courtly names as à la reine and à la dauphine. What dates this particular sauce is the meat glaze: before commercial stock bases, a professional kitchen kept reduced glace on hand as a concentrated seasoning, and a spoonful or two of it was a common way to give a white sauce depth without darkening it.