No. 562

White Sauce; White English Sauce and White Sauce Without Butter

Sauce Blanche, Anglaise et Sauce Blanche sans Beurre

Melt some butter in a saucepan and beat it with the same weight of flour; season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and moisten with water. Set it on the fire and stir constantly until it begins to bubble, then thicken it just before serving with egg-yolks, cream and fresh butter, adding the juice of a lemon; strain the sauce through a tammy and serve.

White Sauce, English Style--Infuse in a pint of boiling cream, the peel of one lemon, a coffeespoonful of white pepper corns, some thyme and a bay leaf, leaving them in for half an hour. Melt three ounces of butter, and stir in it two ounces of flour, fried without coloring, add the prepared infusion, straining it first through a fine sieve, also the juice of a lemon. Set the saucepan on the fire, and stir well till it boils, then leave it for a few minutes and incorporate into it three ounces of fine butter.

White Sauce, Without Butter.—Break into a saucepan four raw egg-yolks, add to them one gill of olive oil, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Heat some water in a saucepan larger than the one containing the eggs and oil, set the smaller into the larger one, and as soon as the water is sufficiently hot that the hand cannot bear the heat then begin to stir it so as to mix the eggs with the oil; as quickly as the sauce is well thickened, take it from the saucepan and serve it at once, adding the juice of a lemon. This sauce should only be tepid, for if a degree warmer the egg-yolks coagulate and the oil separates from them. This sauce is excellent for artichokes and plain boiled asparagus.

← No. 561 Westphalian Sauce Hot Sauces No. 563 York Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Three sauces under one number: a plain flour-and-water white sauce finished with a liaison, an infused cream version, and an oil-and-yolk emulsion held deliberately below coagulation. The first two translate directly; the third does not.

The third sauce is the problem"White Sauce, Without Butter" is four raw yolks warmed in a water bath and served tepid, with the explicit instruction that it must never get warm enough to set. That places the eggs squarely in the temperature range where Salmonella survives and multiplies, and the sauce is served without the eggs ever reaching a lethal temperature. Use a current recipe if you want a warm emulsified egg sauce.
Equal weights, not volumes"the same weight of flour" as butter is a true 1:1 roux by weight; the recipe gives no quantities for this first sauce, nor for the water. The English-style version's 3 oz butter to 2 oz flour is the looser, richer ratio.
Moisten with waterThe first sauce is deliberately lean: water, not stock or milk, with the richness arriving only at the finish. If you substitute a white stock you have made a velouté, which is a different sauce and will taste of it.
CoffeespoonfulSmaller than a teaspoon in nineteenth-century usage — reckon about half a teaspoon of white peppercorns for the pint of cream. They are strained out, so the measure is not critical.
The infusionHalf an hour off the heat in a pint of scalded cream is enough to take the lemon peel, thyme and bay; longer and the bay dominates. Strain before it goes into the roux, and pare the peel without pith.
Lemon and creamAcid can curdle hot cream. Add the lemon juice at the end, off the fire, and stir it in as the finishing butter goes in rather than boiling the sauce afterwards.
Finishing butter and yolksThe 3 oz of "fine butter" and the yolk-and-cream liaison both go in with the pan off the heat, whisked in a little at a time. Return either to a boil and the butter breaks or the yolks scramble.
TammyA tammy is a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was forced with a wooden pestle or by two cooks twisting the ends. A fine chinois, or a sieve lined with muslin, does the same work.
YieldThe English-style sauce makes roughly a pint and a quarter to a pint and a half, enough to sauce a dish of poached fish, boiled fowl or vegetables for a table of eight or so.

A Little History

Ranhofer set these three under a single number, and one might read the grouping as answering the same question — what to pour over boiled fish, fowl or vegetables — from three different directions, though he does not say so. The first is the plain French sauce blanche, a roux slackened with water and enriched only at the last moment, which is what separates it from the stock-based velouté; the second is what an English kitchen of the period meant by white sauce, cream infused with lemon peel, thyme and bay — an infusion that recalls, to a modern eye, the making of bread sauce — then bound and mounted with butter. The third belongs to the older family of oil-and-yolk emulsions that includes mayonnaise and aïoli, warmed just enough to thicken without setting, and Ranhofer's note that it suits artichokes and plain boiled asparagus places it exactly where a cold mayonnaise would otherwise go. The Epicurean (1894) collected the working repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, where Ranhofer was chef for over thirty years, and there the French, English and butterless versions stand side by side.