Home › The World's Kitchen › Mornay Sauce
Mornay Sauce
Heat in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter, add two tablespoons sifted flour, stir well, then add one and a half gills hot milk; season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; sharply whisk for two minutes, add one ounce grated Parmesan cheese and whisk for two minutes. Add one egg yolk, briskly mix while cooking for two minutes, without allowing to boil, and use as required.
A small, tight béchamel enriched with Parmesan and a yolk. The quantities make about three-quarters of a cup, enough to nap two servings of fish, eggs or vegetables.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup (6 fl oz) of milk. Against 1 1/2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour that gives a thick coating sauce, not a pouring one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne is therefore about half a teaspoon in 3/4 cup of sauce, which is aggressively hot by modern taste. A pinch or two is closer to what most cooks now expect from a Mornay.
- Cook the roux firstThe instruction says heat butter, add flour, stir, then add milk. Give the flour a full minute or two over moderate heat before the milk goes in, or the sauce will taste of raw starch under the cheese.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolkOnce the egg yolk is in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. Two minutes over low heat, whisking, thickens it; a boil will scramble the yolk into grains that no amount of whisking will smooth out.
- Cheese off the heatCheese -- Parmesan is added to a sauce already thickened. Keep the heat gentle from that point on — hard cheese heated hard in a thin sauce will break and weep oil.
- ParmesanAn ounce is about 1/3 cup finely grated. Use real Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana; pre-grated powders contain anti-caking starch and will thicken the sauce further and taste chalky.
- ServingTraditionally spooned over poached fish, eggs, chicken or cauliflower and browned briefly under a hot broiler. It thickens as it cools; loosen with a spoonful of hot milk if it sets too stiff to spread.
Mornay is one of the classic derivative sauces of French cooking — béchamel with grated cheese, usually Gruyère, Parmesan, or both — and the name is generally traced to the nineteenth-century Paris restaurant world, with the Mornay family and the restaurant Le Grand Véfour among the figures and places commonly cited; none of the attributions is firmly documented. The finishing egg yolk here is a richer treatment than the plain cheese béchamel usually taught today — good for glazing under a broiler, since the yolk helps it color.