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Sauce, Villeroi
Heat a half ounce butter in a small saucepan, add three-quarters ounce flour, mix well white heating for a minute, then add two light gills milk, one ounce finely chopped cooked ham, one ounce chopped cooked beef tongue, half a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half a light teaspoon salt, a saltspoon each cayenne pepper and grated nutmeg. Mix with a spoon until it comes to a boil and let slowly boil for ten minutes, add two egg yolks, briskly mix while heating for one minute, remove and use as required.
A very thick, meat-flecked béchamel enriched with yolks. It is not a pouring sauce: it is a coating paste meant to be spread over cooked chicken, sweetbreads, fish or vegetables, chilled firm, then breaded and fried.
- The hingeThe sauce must set hard when cold. Spread it on an oiled tray or over the items it will coat, and refrigerate at least two hours before crumbing. If it stays tacky, it was too thin and nothing will hold in the fryer.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is reckoned half a cup (4 fl oz) in American measure, though British sources make it a quarter pint (5 fl oz), so two gills is roughly a cup of milk; "light" means a scant measure, so pour slightly under. A saltspoon is usually taken as a quarter teaspoon.
- Weights to spoonsHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon; three-quarters of an ounce of flour is a little under three tablespoons. That is a higher flour-to-liquid ratio than a table béchamel, and it is deliberate.
- Ten minutes of boilingNot a misprint. The long simmer cooks out the raw flour taste and drives off water so the sauce tightens. Use a heavy pan and stir the bottom constantly, or the ham and tongue will catch.
- The egg yolksOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle and go grainy. One minute over low heat with brisk stirring is enough to thicken and set them.
- Ham and tongueChop both to a near-mince; anything coarser tears the coating when it is crumbed. Cooked beef tongue is a deli or butcher order in most places now, and a well-flavoured cooked ham alone gives an acceptable result.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to coat six to eight cutlets, croquette-sized pieces of chicken, or a dozen small vegetable pieces.
Sauce Villeroi is one of the old grand-cuisine "coating" sauces, traditionally traced to the Villeroy family of French marshals and courtiers, though as with most such attributions the naming is culinary legend rather than documented fact. Its purpose is structural: French kitchens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used a stiff, yolk-bound béchamel to jacket cooked morsels so they could be breaded and deep-fried without drying out, and anything served à la Villeroi on a period menu had been treated this way. The version here, with its ham, tongue, cayenne and nutmeg, is closer to what older books describe as a Villeroi with a salpicon worked in, and its appearance in an international collection of this era reflects how thoroughly professional French technique had become the shared vocabulary of hotel and household cooking alike.