No. 558
Viennese Sauce
Sauce a la Viennoise
A compound sauce in the strictest sense: it assumes you already have a quart-scale batch of allemande on the stove and a crock of crawfish butter in the larder. Almost all the work sits in those two cross-references.
- What allemande isAllemande is classically a velouté (blond roux moistened with white stock) finished with a liaison of egg yolks, sometimes with cream, and strained; Ranhofer's own No. 407 should be read for his exact version. It is thick, pale and glossy, not a plain veloute.
- Heat after the liaisonOnce the yolks are in, the sauce must never boil again or it will curdle. Hold it below about 180F while you season, and add the crawfish butter off the direct heat.
- Crawfish butterNo. 573 is a compound butter: crawfish shells and trimmings pounded with butter, warmed, then pressed through a sieve or cheesecloth so the butter takes the color and flavor and the shell is left behind (check No. 573 for his proportions). A food processor does the pounding; the straining still has to be done through fine cloth.
- Mounting the butterFour ounces of butter into one pint of sauce is a substantial enrichment. Whisk it in cold, in pieces, so it emulsifies rather than breaking out as an oil slick.
- Red pepperIn 1894 American kitchen usage this means cayenne, not paprika and not a fresh chile. A pinch is enough; the point is warmth behind the shellfish, not heat.
- Lemon and nutmegAdd the lemon juice last among the seasonings and taste as you go. Acid on an egg-thickened sauce that is too hot is the most reliable way to make it break.
- Yield and useOne pint dresses six to eight portions. It is a fish and poached-poultry sauce -- sole, turbot, quenelles, chicken breast -- and it should be spooned over at the last moment, since the parsley dulls within minutes.
Charles Ranhofer, who ran the Delmonico's kitchen in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete working system: the hot sauce chapter is deliberately built so that a handful of mother sauces and compound butters generate dozens of numbered variations, which is why No. 558 is three lines long and points at two other entries. The name follows the nineteenth-century French convention of labeling garnishes and sauces after cities and courts, and the various sauces a la viennoise of the period share little beyond the tag -- it signaled prestige on a menu more than it described Viennese cooking. Crawfish butter itself belonged to the classical repertoire long before this book; pounding shells with butter to extract the color was the standard way to get shellfish flavor and a rose tint into a white sauce before commercial extracts existed.