Home › Fish, Eggs, and Sauces › Garlic Sauce
Garlic Sauce
(Provence.) Peel and chop 2 cloves of garlic; boil in 4 waters, drain, and chop fine. Add 1/2 pint of stock, a blending of flour and butter, yolk of 1 egg, and a pinch of salt. Strain before use, serve hot, with entrees.
A small velouté flavored with blanched garlic and thickened with egg yolk. The whole thing takes about ten minutes and lives or dies on the temperature of the yolk.
- The hinge: never let it boil after the yolk goes inTake the pan off the heat, temper the yolk with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce, then return it and hold below about 180F until it thickens. A simmer will scramble the yolk and no amount of straining will hide it.
- "Boil in 4 waters"Blanch the chopped garlic in boiling water, drain, and repeat with fresh water four times in all, a minute or so each. This strips out the harsh sulfur compounds and leaves a mild, almost sweet garlic. Skipping it gives a much sharper sauce than intended.
- Half a pint of stockIf the measure is American, half a pint is one cup; in a British book it would be nearer ten fluid ounces. A light veal or chicken stock suits it; use fish stock if the sauce is going with fish.
- "A blending of flour and butter"A beurre manié: roughly one tablespoon each, mashed to a paste and whisked into the simmering stock in pieces. About a tablespoon of flour to a cup of liquid gives a coating sauce, not a paste.
- Two cloves is genuinely mildAfter four blanchings, two cloves in a cup of sauce reads as a background note. If you want the garlic forward, four to six cloves is still within the spirit of the method.
- Strain, and whyThe instruction to strain is not fussiness; blanched garlic breaks into fibrous shreds that feel wrong in a smooth sauce. A fine sieve, pressing the solids to extract the flavor, is enough.
- "Entrees" in this periodNot the main course in the modern American sense but the made dishes served between the fish and the roast: sweetbreads, cutlets, quenelles, poached eggs. It also does well over poached chicken or white fish.
- Yield and holdingAbout one cup, enough for four servings. Hold it in a bowl over warm, not simmering, water, and do not reheat it directly.
Provence has more than one garlic sauce, and this is the more genteel sort: not aioli, which is raw garlic pounded with oil, but a French kitchen sauce in which garlic is tamed by repeated blanching and then folded into a flour-thickened stock finished with egg yolk. The blanching-in-several-waters trick is old and widespread in French cookery, appearing wherever garlic or onion was thought too coarse for a delicate sauce. Its appearance here, labeled simply "(Provence.)", suggests a collection that gathered regional dishes and rendered them in compressed household-manual prose, on the assumption that the reader already knew how to make a velute and needed only the local twist. That the recipe is served "with entrees" places it in the multi-course dinner, where sauces were expected to belong to a course rather than a dish.