French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [67]
Those who prefer a milder sauce can omit the orange juice and make up the quantity with a little extra stock. In any case, this is not a sauce to be served if you are drinking a fine wine with your duck; it would overwhelm it. If it is to go with a domestic duck, the stock can be made from the giblets.
SAUCE BERCY
WHITE WINE AND SHALLOT SAUCE
A useful and excellent little hot sauce to be made when you have a small amount of natural concentrated gravy from a roast, a little jelly left over from a bœuf mode, or some of the meat glaze described above; or for fish, some aromatic stock made from trimmings and bones, plus sliced onion and carrot.
Chop 4 shallots very finely. Put them in a small saucepan with half a claret glass of dry white wine. Let it boil until it is reduced by half. Add 2 tablespoons of the gravy (with, naturally, all fat removed) or melted meat glaze or fish stock; season; off the fire stir in 1 oz. of good butter, a squeeze of lemon juice, and a small quantity of very finely chopped parsley.
Apart from grills of meat or fish, sauce bercy is delicious with eggs, fried or sur le plat or en cocotte, and with fried or grilled sausages.
SAUCE BÉCHAMEL
There are two different versions of this universally known, rather dull but useful sauce. One is a béchamel grasse, made with a proportion of meat or chicken stock, the other béchamel maigre, in which milk is the only liquid used. The latter is the one more generally useful—in fact essential—to know, for it forms the basis of many others which are infinitely more interesting.
To make a small quantity of straightforward béchamel, first put pint of milk to heat in a small saucepan; melt 1 oz. of butter in another and suitably thick saucepan. As soon as the butter starts to foam, add, off the fire, 2 level tablespoons of sieved plain flour; stir it into the butter immediately. Now add a little of the warmed milk, stirring until a thick paste is formed. Return the saucepan to a low flame and gradually add the rest of the milk. Upon this initial operation depends the success of the sauce, for once the butter, flour and milk are amalgamated and smooth, your sauce is unlikely later to turn lumpy. Having seasoned the mixture with about half a teaspoon of salt, a scrap of grated nutmeg and a little freshly milled white pepper, put a mat over the flame and let your sauce gently, very gently, simmer for a minimum of 10 minutes, stirring all the time. Half the badly made white sauces one encounters are due to the fact that they are not sufficiently cooked, and so have a crude taste of flour. Also, they are very often made too thick and pasty. A good béchamel should be of a creamy consistency.
After 10 minutes, the saucepan containing the béchamel can be placed in another larger one containing water (see drawing on page 58); this improvised bain-marie is a better system than cooking the sauce in the top half of a double saucepan, for by the bain-marie method the sauce is surrounded by heat instead of only cooking over heat, and therefore matures better and more completely.
Notes:
(1) If you have to cook your béchamel in advance, cover the surface while the sauce is still hot with minuscule knobs of butter which, in melting, create a film which prevents the formation of a skin.
(2) Always reheat the sauce by the bain-marie system.
(3) If the béchamel is to be served straight, without further flavouring, allow a little extra milk and simmer in it for a few minutes a little piece of onion, a bayleaf, a sprig of parsley, a slice of carrot, all tied together for easy removal when the milk is added to the sauce.
(4) If, in spite of all precautions, the sauce has turned lumpy, press it through a fine sieve into a clean saucepan. The electric liquidiser also comes to the rescue here.
(5) To make a béchamel grasse, for the milk substitute the same quantity, or at least a good proportion,