No. 551

Truffle Sauce

Sauce aux Truffes

Moisten one pound of chicken parings with three pints of veloute stock (No. 422) and a quarter of a bottleful of white wine; add to it a bunch of parsley garnished with a bay leaf, and as much thyme, a quarter of a pound of minced carrots, four ounces of onions, one branch of celery and one coffeespoonful of whole peppers; let it all simmer for two hours, then strain through a sieve and reduce the sauce to half, skimming it well in the meanwhile; now add one quart of allemande sauce (No. 407), and reduce again with a quarter of a bottleful of white wine. Strain the whole through a tammy, and just when serving incorporate into the sauce four ounces of fresh butter and three ounces of peeled and minced truffles.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Ranhofer sauce in the full nineteenth-century manner: a mother sauce reinforced with a second stock, reduced twice, then finished with butter and truffle. Nothing about it is difficult, but it assumes two other recipes are already in your refrigerator.

The two base saucesVelouté (No. 422 in the book is the white stock/velouté base) is a white roux thickened with veal or chicken stock. Allemande is velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and lemon. Without these two on hand the recipe cannot start; a good reduced chicken velouté stands in for both if you accept a thinner, less rich result.
Chicken paringsRanhofer means the trimmings left from butchering birds for other dishes: backs, wing tips, necks, scraps of breast. A pound of chicken wings or backs, chopped, does the same work.
A quarter of a bottlefulBottle sizes were not standardised in the period, but ran in the neighbourhood of 750 ml, so a quarter bottle is roughly 3/4 cup. The recipe uses that amount twice, once at the start and once in the final reduction.
CoffeespoonfulSmaller than a teaspoon, generally reckoned at about half a teaspoon.
TammyA tightly woven worsted cloth, twisted between two people to force sauce through. A fine chinois lined with damp muslin, pressed with a ladle, gives the same clarity.
Do not boil after the butter goes inThe allemande already carries egg yolk, and the final four ounces of butter is a monté au beurre. Once either is incorporated, hold the sauce below a simmer or it will break and look curdled.
Truffles at the very endThree ounces of minced truffle stirred in at service, as written. Prolonged cooking drives off much of the aroma, which is why they go in at service rather than into the reduction.
YieldThree pints of stock plus a quart of allemande, reduced twice, lands somewhere near a quart of finished sauce — enough for twenty or more restaurant portions. Halving or quartering the whole thing is sensible for home cooking.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen 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. 551 begins by referring you to Nos. 407 and 422. The numbered cross-reference is the whole architecture of French professional cooking as Car u00eame codified it: a handful of mother sauces, each spun off into dozens of named derivatives. Truffle sauces of this type, built on a white foundation rather than a brown one, are generally said to have been served with poultry, sweetbreads and quenelles, where a demi-glace would have overwhelmed the dish. The quantity of truffle is worth noting: three ounces used as a garnish, casually, in a book written when European black truffles arrived in New York in quantity and were, by most accounts, considerably cheaper in real terms than they are now.