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Sauce for Cutlets, Croquettes, or Fish
Beat 2 eggs with salt, pepper, and the juice of a lemon. Add it to 1/2 pint of boiling milk, stir in a pan of hot water until it thickens, adding 1 tablespoonful of parsley. This is a very useful and economical recipe.
A thin egg-and-milk sauce cooked in a bain-marie — essentially a savoury pouring custard. Everything depends on keeping it below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe eggs are the only thickener, so the sauce sets by gentle coagulation at roughly 170-180F. Direct heat or a rolling water bath will scramble it within seconds; keep the water beneath at a bare shiver and stir constantly until the sauce coats the back of a spoon.
- "A pan of hot water"This is a double boiler, not an ingredient. Set a heatproof bowl or a smaller saucepan over a pan of hot water so the bowl does not touch the surface.
- Half a pintRead as an imperial half-pint this is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups; read as an American half-pint it is 1 cup and gives a slightly thicker sauce. The book does not say which is meant, and either works.
- Lemon and hot milkAcid plus hot dairy plus eggs is the classic curdling combination. Beat the lemon juice into the eggs as directed, then pour the hot milk into the egg mixture in a thin stream while whisking, rather than tipping eggs into the pan. Returning the tempered mixture to the bowl over hot water is safer than the literal order given.
- Seasoning quantitiesNone are specified. Start with 1/2 teaspoon salt and a good grinding of pepper for a cup of milk, and correct at the end, when the sauce has thickened and the flavour has concentrated.
- ParsleyFlat-leaf or curly, finely chopped, stirred in off the heat so it stays green. A tablespoon is a generous amount for this volume and is what carries the sauce.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups depending on how the half-pint is read, enough for about four portions of cutlets, croquettes or poached fish. Serve at once; it will not hold long over heat and separates if reheated. If it does thin on standing, whisk it briefly back over the hot water.
- If it splitsPull the bowl off the water immediately and whisk in a tablespoon of cold milk, or push the sauce through a fine sieve. Once it has gone grainy throughout, no amount of whisking will bring it back.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of books that gathered "foreign" household recipes for English-speaking cooks. This sauce sits at the economical end of a family of egg-thickened sauces that in professional kitchens ran to hollandaise and — by way of a yolk liaison stirred into a velouté — sauce allemande: something like the same coagulation of yolk over gentle heat, but with milk standing in for butter and stock, and whole eggs rather than yolks alone. The author's note that it is "very useful and economical" is the point of it. A cook with two eggs, a lemon and a cup of milk could dress reheated croquettes or plain boiled fish and make them look intentional.