No. 544

Sour Sauce

Sauce Aigrelette

Put into a saucepan one pint of allemande sauce (No. 407) with one ounce of meat glaze (No. 401), some white pepper and nutmeg; beat the sauce well and stir in one gill of lemon juice, the same quantity of gooseberries or verjuice, also two ounces of fresh butter; strain through a tammy and serve.

← No. 543 Soubise Sauce Hot Sauces No. 545 Soya Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A short finishing sauce that assumes you already have Ranhofer's building blocks on hand. Everything here depends on the allemande base, which is egg-yolk bound and will curdle if you let it boil once the acid goes in.

Keep it below a simmerAllemande is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Adding a cup of lemon juice and verjuice to a hot yolk-bound sauce is exactly the condition under which it breaks, so hold the pan at 160-175F, stir constantly, and add the acid in a thin stream.
Allemande sauce (No. 407)A veal or chicken velouté enriched with egg yolks, cream and a little lemon. If you are not working through the whole book, a well-reduced blond velouté finished off the heat with two yolks beaten into a few spoonfuls of cream gives the same body.
Meat glaze (No. 401)Glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. One ounce is roughly two tablespoons of the set glaze. Commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute, used sparingly since it is saltier than a homemade reduction.
A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. The recipe therefore takes a full cup of acid to a pint of sauce, which is aggressive by modern taste; add half, taste, then continue.
Gooseberries or verjuiceBoth supply sour fruit acid rather than the sharper citrus note. Verjuice, the pressed juice of unripe grapes, is sold again by specialist grocers; for gooseberries the intent is hard green fruit, crushed and strained, not the sweet ripe ones.
Butter lastThe two ounces of fresh butter go in cold and off the heat, whisked in piece by piece. Butter added to a boiling sauce will simply separate and leave the finish greasy.
Through a tammyA tammy is a fine worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people in a professional kitchen. A conical chinois pressed with a ladle, or a doubled square of muslin, does the job.
YieldAbout a pint and a half of finished sauce, enough for eight to ten servings with poached chicken, veal or fish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system set down in print, which is why sauce No. 544 is written as a pair of cross-references and a handful of finishing touches rather than as a standalone recipe. Aigrelette is simply the French for a little tart or sourish, and the sauce belongs to a long line of sharp fruit-acid sauces that predate the general availability of lemons in northern European kitchens: verjuice, the juice of unripe grapes, and green gooseberry juice were the standard souring agents of medieval and early modern cookery, gooseberries in particular being so associated with sharp sauces for oily fish. By Ranhofer's day lemon had largely displaced both, and their appearance here alongside lemon juice reads as a deliberate piece of old-fashioned refinement of the sort a Delmonico's customer was paying for.