No. 554

Valois Sauce

Sauce a la Valois

Boil two gills of white wine with one gill of vinegar and add two tablespoonfuls of chopped shallots, let the liquid reduce thoroughly, then remove it from the fire, let partly cool and stir in six egg-yolks, beat them up with an egg-beater and finish the sauce with four ounces of fine fresh butter slowly incorporated; strain and after returning it to the saucepan stir into it two ounces more of butter and mix in one spoonful of chopped parsley, or replace half the parsley by chopped tarragon leaves if preferred.

← No. 553 La Valliere Sauce Hot Sauces No. 555 Venetian Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a béarnaise in all but name: a shallot-and-wine reduction, yolks, butter. The hinge is heat control — the yolks must thicken over gentle warmth and never approach a simmer, or the sauce scrambles and no amount of beating brings it back.

The measuresA gill is half a cup, so two gills of white wine is 1 cup and one gill of vinegar is 1/2 cup. Use a white wine vinegar rather than cider or malt.
"Reduce thoroughly"Take the wine, vinegar and shallots down to roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of syrupy liquid — the pan should be nearly dry, with the shallots glossy. Under-reducing gives a thin, sharp sauce that will not hold the butter.
Heat for the yolksRanhofer's "remove from the fire, let partly cool" leaves the yolks to set on residual heat, with a cook watching it; the recipe does not say what pan is used. In a modern thin-bottomed pan the safer equivalent is a bowl set over barely simmering water, whisking until the yolks thicken to a ribbon and reach about 160F on an instant-read thermometer.
Butter ratioFour ounces plus two ounces of butter to six yolks is very lean by present-day standards; expect a pungent, custardy sauce. For a texture closer to what most cooks now expect from béarnaise, work up toward 1 1/2 to 2 ounces of butter per yolk, added a few pieces at a time off direct heat.
When to strainStrain after the first four ounces of butter and before the parsley, as written — the point is to remove the shallot debris while keeping the herbs visible and fresh. Press the shallots in the sieve to get the flavor through.
Holding itThe sauce will break if it goes above roughly 180F or drops cold. Keep it in a warm (not hot) water bath and use it within an hour; do not reheat over direct flame.
HerbsChopped tarragon in place of half the parsley pushes this toward standard béarnaise. Fresh only — dried tarragon in a butter emulsion tastes dusty.
YieldAbout 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings of grilled beef, lamb chops, or poached fish.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of what came out of the Delmonico's kitchen in New York over three decades, and its long run of hot sauces is essentially the Escoffier-era French repertoire as an American luxury restaurant practiced it. Sauce Valois is generally said to take its name from the French royal house, one of a whole family of nineteenth-century sauces christened after dynasties, courtiers and restaurants — its immediate neighbors here are La Vallière and Venetian. In most French usage Valois is given as a synonym for sauce Foyot, a béarnaise enriched with a spoonful of meat glaze and generally traced to the Restaurant Foyot near the Luxembourg in Paris; Ranhofer leaves the glaze out, so what he prints is a plain tarragon-or-parsley béarnaise under a grander name. That kind of loose, overlapping nomenclature was normal before Escoffier's Guide Culinaire (1903) set about pruning the sauce lists into a system.