Veloute Sauce
Put one tablespoonful of butter and one of flour in a saucepan; when melted and bubbling, add one cupful of strong white stock and stir until smooth; cover, draw to one side of the fire and simmer gently for half an hour; strain, season with salt and pepper to taste. The yolks of two raw eggs, one teaspoonful of butter and one teaspoonful of lemon juice, "sauce Allemanda," while equal quantities of white stock and cream give Bechamel. Aurora sauce is made by adding to Bechamel two tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of cream, one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, a quarter of a teaspoonful of paprika and sufficient lobster coral to give a faint pink tinge.
A compact entry that gives one base sauce and three derivatives in a single paragraph. The velouté itself is straightforward; the value is in reading the second half as three separate finishing operations rather than one continuous set of directions.
- Quantities and yieldOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of stock gives a thin pouring sauce, yielding somewhat less than the starting cup once it is strained. The recipe states no yield or number of servings.
- "Strong white stock"A well-reduced, unbrowned veal or chicken stock with enough gelatin to set when cold. Boxed broth will make the sauce taste thin and floury; reduce a quart by half first, or supplement with a little unflavored gelatin.
- "Draw to one side of the fire"On a range this means the lowest burner setting, or a heat diffuser. The half-hour simmer is not padding: it cooks out the raw starch. Keep the pan barely trembling and skim any skin that forms.
- Keep the roux blondMelted and bubbling only. As soon as the flour takes color the sauce becomes a velouté in name and an espagnole in flavor.
- The hinge: Allemande must not boilThe two yolks, butter and lemon juice go in off the heat, after straining. Temper the yolks with a few spoonfuls of hot sauce first, return the pan to very low heat, and stop the moment it thickens. Above roughly 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce breaks into grains.
- "Bechamel" here is not modern bechamelAt the time this was written the word could still mean a velouté enriched with cream rather than a milk sauce. As written: equal parts white stock and cream in place of the cup of stock. A modern bechamel made with milk alone is a different sauce.
- Lobster coralThe dark green roe of a hen lobster, which turns coral red on cooking. It is rarely sold separately now; you would need to buy a whole female lobster. Sweet paprika and a spoonful of tomato paste will give the color, though not the shellfish flavor.
- "Sufficient" is genuinely vagueThe coral is measured by eye to a faint pink tinge, so no conversion is possible. Work it into softened butter, then whisk that butter into the warm sauce a little at a time, judging the color as you go.
- Salt lastReduced stock concentrates as it simmers, and the Aurora finish adds two tablespoons of butter and a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar. Season after the derivative is finished, not before.
Velouté is one of the sauces Antonin Carême grouped as foundations of French cookery in the early nineteenth century, and the name simply means "velvety" — a white roux sauce made with stock rather than milk. Escoffier later kept it among the mother sauces and treated Allemande, once considered a base in its own right, as a velouté finished with an egg liaison, which is more or less what this entry does. Its appearance in an English-language household manual is of a piece with the way the classical French repertoire filtered into such books as a short list of "made sauces" a competent housekeeper was expected to produce, compressed here into a single paragraph with three variations stacked on the end. The loose use of "Bechamel" for a cream-enriched stock sauce is also worth noting, since the term had not yet settled universally onto milk-based sauce.