No. 553

La Valliere Sauce

Sauce a la La Valliere

Reduce one quart of veloute (No. 415) with one quart of veal blond (No. 423), and the broth obtained from cooking eight ounces of mushrooms, add one tablespoonful of meat glaze (No. 401) and thicken the sauce with four egg-yolks diluted in half a gill of cream and two ounces of fresh butter. Strain through a tammy and add half a pound of channeled mushrooms (No. 118).

← No. 552 Turtle Sauce, Fat and Lean Hot Sauces No. 554 Valois Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic velouté derivative from Ranhofer's cross-referenced system, where each numbered component assumes the one before it. Read it as an outline: two stocks reduced together, finished with a yolk liaison and butter.

The hinge: the liaisonOnce the four yolks diluted in cream go in, the sauce must never boil. Hold it below about 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; a single boil scrambles the yolks and no straining will recover the texture.
Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons. The two ounces of butter is by weight, half a stick; in the original it goes in with the yolks and cream as part of the liaison, before the sauce is strained.
Velouté and veal blondVelouté (No. 415) is a white stock thickened with pale roux; veal blond (No. 423) is a lightly coloured veal stock, not a brown one. Substituting brown stock changes the colour and the name of the sauce.
Meat glazeGlace de viande, stock reduced to a syrupy, sliceable concentrate. A tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate is the nearest modern stand-in; it is a seasoning here, not a thickener.
The reduction is unspecifiedTwo quarts of liquid plus mushroom broth need to come down substantially before thickening, but Ranhofer gives no target. Reduce by roughly half, to about a quart, before adding the liaison, and judge by body rather than volume.
Mushroom brothThe liquid from cooking eight ounces of mushrooms, not a soaking liquor from dried ones. Dried mushroom liquid is far stronger and darker and will push the sauce out of its pale register.
Channeled mushroomsTurned or fluted mushroom caps, cut with a small knife into a spiral of grooves and cooked white in acidulated water. Purely decorative; plain quartered caps taste identical.
TammyA tammy cloth is a fine worsted strainer, worked by twisting the cloth to force the sauce through. A chinois lined with damp muslin does the same job.
YieldThis makes roughly a quart of finished sauce, restaurant rather than domestic scale. Quartering the quantities is sensible for home cooking, and the sauce does not reheat well once the yolks are in.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of more than three decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and its sauce chapter is essentially the classical French repertoire transplanted to Manhattan, complete with the courtly nomenclature. Sauce La Vallière takes its name, as such sauces generally do, from Louise de La Vallière, an early mistress of Louis XIV, though there is no evidence any dish so called was eaten in her lifetime; nineteenth-century chefs attached names from the Bourbon court to new preparations the way earlier cooks had named them for the ingredient. What identifies it is not the name but the construction: a velouté fortified with veal stock and mushroom liquor, then finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison, the same family that produces sauce allemande and sauce poulette. The channeled mushrooms are the period's signature, a labour of knifework that signalled a house with enough commis to spare for it.