French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [46]
(b) The painting of cold joints with melted meat glaze to give a brilliant surface.
(c) The freezing of any food in ice or the refrigerator (not deep freezing).
(d) The icing of cakes and pastries with sugar icing.
(e) The dusting of sweet fritters, etc., with icing sugar.
Lardage des viandes To lard a piece of meat is to introduce fat into an otherwise dry joint, such as veal, venison and second- and third-grade cuts of beef. It is done with a special larding needle (lardoire) and pieces of pork fat cut into little sticks of uniform size and shape (lardoons). These lardoons should penetrate right through the meat. Much the same results can be achieved by making deep incisions in the meat and then inserting the lardoons by hand. This is often done for a daube. The appearance of the meat is not so elegant when cut as it is if the larding has been done professionally, but the effect has been achieved. A characteristic dish in which the meat is always larded is bœuf à la mode. (See the drawing on page 70.)
Liaison d’une sauce The binding or thickening of a sauce. This is achieved by various methods, each one of which is clearly explained in the relevant recipes in this book. The typical sauce thickened with egg yolks is sauce béarnaise, page 118. For a white flour-based sauce, Béchamel on page 114 is the prototype; and for one in which the flour is browned before the addition of the liquid see the saupiquet des Amognes, page 231: this sauce is really a variation of espagnole. For a sauce made purely of butter and cream, see the recipe for the cream sauce to serve with poule au pot à la normande, page 403; for a cream sauce plus the butter and juices in the pan the escalope cauchoise, page 373, can be taken as an example. For a sauce containing flour, cream and eggs, see the cream sauce served with the poule au riz à la crème, page 404, from which it can be observed that when flour is present in a sauce the added egg yolks can be allowed to come to the simmering point, which would be disastrous in a sauce like Béarnaise in which there is no flour.
For a stew in which the meat is cooked in an already thickened sauce bœuf bourguignonne, page 343, is the best example, but such stews are not so common in French household cookery as they are in our own. They should be cooked on top of the stove rather than in the oven, because all-round heat tends to disintegrate the sauce. This misfortune may also occur, especially when it is a question of a small quantity of sauce, when something has cooked too fast on top of the stove, and you find that your meat is floating in a little clear liquid while all the nice thick juices are beginning to stick to the bottom of the pan. To remedy this, remove your meat and keep it warm; pour off the clear liquid; heat it in a separate pan, adding extra stock or water; gradually pour it back over the juices in the original pan, and cook gently, stirring all the time, for about 10 minutes, and you will find your sauce has reintegrated. It is amazing what can be done in cookery by keeping one’s head and making use of a small quantity of plain water. Sometimes even a curdled cream or egg sauce can be brought back by a similar method.
The last-minute thickening of a sauce with beurre manié, in other words butter and flour worked together cold, is explained in the recipe for coq au vin, page 399. People are frightened of this method, perhaps because of the many conflicting instructions one sees in cookery books regarding the manner of its use. It is really very simple, but I think myself it is a system to which one should not have recourse too often. Flour-thickened sauces pall very easily, whereas those obtained by reduction (see the simplified recipe for meat stock and meat glaze, page 112) tend to have a much truer taste. In fact that one word reduction lies at the base of a really very large proportion