No. 547

Supreme Sauce

Sauce Supreme

Remove the breasts from five chickens, break up the carcasses and second joints. Cut two pounds of kernel of veal into large squares, and cook them with the chicken bones, in half a pound of butter without allowing them to color, then moisten with seven quarts of veloute stock (No. 422); let boil, skim well, and season with salt, pepper, and a bunch of parsley garnished with basil and bay leaf, and continue to boil for two hours, being careful to skim off the top when necessary; then strain the whole through a fine sieve. Place a saucepan on a slow fire, containing one quarter of a pound of butter and as much flour; when cooked without coloring, moisten it with one and a half quarts of the above stock, and let it boil on one side of the stove only, so as to be able to skim it properly, now add a quarter of a bottleful of Sauterne wine, cook again, and despumate for two hours; strain the sauce through a tammy, and reduce with one pint of cream, and just when ready to serve, beat in a piece of fresh butter.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is restaurant work written for a brigade: the first paragraph builds a double-strength chicken and veal stock from the trimmings of five birds, and only a fraction of it becomes sauce. Read it as two operations and scale the first one down hard.

The hinge: never let it colorBoth the initial sweating of bones and veal and the roux must stay blond. Any browning turns supreme sauce into a pale velouté-gravy; the whole point is a white sauce with chicken flavor and no toasted notes. Keep the heat low and stir.
ScaleSeven quarts of stock reduced over two hours, of which only a quart and a half is used, made sense in a kitchen sending out chicken suprêmes all night. For home use, scale everything down together and keep the recipe's own proportions: equal weights of butter and flour, roughly an ounce of each to a cup and a half of stock, with cream added at the end.
"Kernel of veal"The noix, the rounded cushion muscle from the inside of the veal leg. It is there for gelatin and clean savor, not for eating. Veal breast or shank meat does the same job; a butcher's veal bones plus a little shoulder is the practical substitute.
Velouté stock, No. 422Velouté stock, No. 422 -- Here it functions as the moistening liquid, not as a finished velouté sauce: it is what the bones and veal are cooked in, and the result is strained and used to wet the roux. A good unsalted white chicken stock stands in.
DespumateNot a technique so much as a discipline: to skim the scum and fat that collect as the sauce simmers. That is why he says to boil it on one side of the stove only, so the convection pushes the scum to the cool edge where you can lift it off. On a modern burner, set the pan half off the flame.
TammyA worsted or fine cotton straining cloth, wrung between two people in a professional kitchen. A fine chinois, or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin, gives the same result.
Sauterne, a quarter bottlefulAbout 6 fl oz. "Sauterne" was often used loosely in nineteenth-century America for white Bordeaux and for white wine generally, not only the sweet wine, so a dry white is probably the safer reading here; a sweet Sauternes will noticeably sugar the finished sauce.
Cream and the final butterReduce with the cream over moderate heat until it coats a spoon, then take the pan off the heat before beating in the cold butter. Butter worked into a boiling sauce separates and the gloss is lost.
Yield and useUse -- It is the classic coating for poached or gently sautéed chicken breasts, sweetbreads, and poached eggs, and it is meant to be seasoned and finished at the last minute.

A Little History

Sauce suprême is the standard cream-and-chicken derivative of velouté in the nineteenth-century French repertoire, and its name comes from the same root as suprêmes de volaille, the trimmed breast fillets it was most often poured over. That connection is literal in this recipe: Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York and author of The Epicurean (1894), begins by removing the breasts from five chickens and building the sauce from what is left, so that nothing in the larder is wasted while the fillets go out to the dining room. The two-hour skimming, the tammy cloth, and the quart-scale reductions belong to a kitchen with a coal range that ran all day and enough hands to tend it, which is why the velouté family of this period reads as infrastructure rather than as single dishes. Escoffier codified much the same sauce nine years later, in Le Guide Culinaire (1903), and it survives in modern French practice largely unchanged in principle: chicken velouté reduced with mushroom cooking liquor and cream, butter at the end, and no color anywhere.