French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [65]
TABLE OF EQUIVALENT OVEN TEMPERATURES
Les Sauces
Sauces7
THE approach to French sauce cookery for the small household is a totally different one from that of the restaurant or the grand private establishment presided over by a professional chef. On the one hand, you have the sauces of so-called ‘classic’ cookery, based on large quantities of stocks and broths, essences and meat glazes, the fonds bruns, the fonds blancs, the jus, the fumets of game and of fish, all obtained by lengthy simmering, straining, reduction and all the processes which imply time, expense, a large staff, an elaborate batterie de cuisine, plus a very highly developed sense of taste and a devotion to his work which the cook does not always possess.
The result of all this sauce mystique, evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when conditions were so utterly different from our own, is that today sauces have become a horribly debased branch of cookery. There now appear to be in Anglo-French cooking just two basic sauces: a thick brown one, known as espagnole, and a thick white one which passes for béchamel. The espagnole, made with flour and brown stock, heavily flavoured and coloured nowadays with tomato purée, is heated up over and over again and appears, flavoured with cooking port, as sauce madère, with shreds of orange peel as sauce bigarade, with diced gherkins as sauce piquante, with a chopped tinned truffle as sauce Périgueux. The near-béchamel becomes, with the addition of cheese, sauce Mornay, with a little chicken broth, sauce velouté, with tomato purée sauce aurore. The inevitable result is that every dish has the same basic flavour, and because the sauces are stale, not a very good one at that.
In simple French household cookery, because they are made freshly and in small quantities, sauces are rather different both in conception and execution. The first principle is that whenever possible the sauce for a given dish is composed of elements supplied by the main ingredient of that dish itself. That is to say, the trimmings of a joint, the giblets of a bird, the carcase and head of a fish, are simmered to make a broth or bouillon which will eventually supply the basis of the sauce. When no such elements are present, as in the case of grilled meat or fish, eggs, vegetables, rice, pasta and so on, then there are the egg and butter sauces of which bearnaise and hollandaise are the two most obvious, and the vegetable purée sauces such as Soubise (onions), tomato, mushroom. Then there are the sauces of which the juices of the meat or fish itself after it has cooked form the basis, with cream or wine or stock and a binding of yolks of eggs or flour and butter (beurre manié) being used to complete it.
Apart from all these alternatives, there is the whole repertory of cold sauces derived either from mayonnaise or more simply from vinaigrette, and all the butters flavoured with herbs and aromatics, of which maître d’hôtel or parsley butter is the simplest form.
So it will be seen that between the stock-pot sauces of the restaurant and the gravy browning and water of the old-fashioned English domestic cook, between the rich and complicated coulis d’écrevisses which is considered a fitting accompaniment to salmon in grand French cookery, and the bottled horrors of our own boarding-house tables, there is a world of delicious sauces, fresh and easily made, designed to help the food with which they are served rather than to drown it. And so long as the ingredients used are of good quality, no artificial colourings and no substitutes in the way of tinned or bottled stuff being allowed, so long as the seasoning and blending has been done with a light hand and good judgment, these simple sauces of home cookery will be more appreciated than all the grandiose confections of the now out-dated and overrated haute cuisine.
Anyone who can produce even the few easy sauces described in this chapter and serve them with well-cooked grills or roasts, poached or fried fish or even eggs or sausages, will soon get a reputation for that kind of