Home › Game › White Sauce (Make the white sauce the same)
White Sauce (Make the white sauce the same)
Make the white sauce the same as the brown, but use all veal and white stock. When the butter and flour are cooked together be careful that they do not get browned.
This is a variation entry: it assumes you have the preceding brown sauce recipe in front of you and changes only the fat's color and the stock. What it describes is a velouté, not the milk-based white sauce the name suggests today.
- It is not béchamelA modern cook reading "white sauce" expects butter, flour and milk. This one is butter, flour and pale veal stock "velouté" in classical terms. There is no dairy in it beyond the butter.
- White stock means unroasted bonesVeal bones (and any trimmings) are blanched and simmered without browning, so the stock stays pale straw-colored. Roasted bones give a brown stock and will tint the finished sauce, which defeats the whole point of the instruction.
- The hinge: a white rouxMelt the butter over low to medium heat and cook the flour only until it loses its raw smell and looks like wet sand, roughly 2 to 3 minutes, with no color at all. If it takes on even a blond tinge the sauce will read beige rather than ivory.
- Proportions are not given hereThe quantities live in the brown sauce recipe this one refers to. A workable modern guide is equal weights butter and flour to about 1 pint (2 cups) of stock for a coating sauce; use less flour for something looser.
- Add stock warm, off the heatAdd stock in stages -- Whisking the stock into the roux in two or three additions prevents lumps better than pouring it all at once.
- Simmer longer than seems necessaryTwenty minutes at a bare simmer, skimming, cooks out the pasty flour taste that spoils an underdone flour sauce. Strain through a fine sieve before serving.
- Yield and useTwo cups of stock yields enough sauce for four to six servings. It suits poached or braised pale meats -- rabbit, young birds, veal quenelles -- rather than anything roasted dark.
Sauce entries like this one show how thoroughly the French classification of sauces had settled into American household books: brown and white, each built on a roux and a matching stock, each the parent of a number of small sauces made by adding cream, egg yolks, mushrooms, herbs or wine. The word velouté ("velvety") belongs to that system, though the technique of a pale roux moistened with light broth is considerably older than any of the printed hierarchies. What is telling is the compression: the author trusts the reader to have made the brown sauce already and needs only one sentence of correction, plus one warning about the roux. That warning is the whole recipe, and it is the same one taught in kitchens today.