French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [68]
SAUCE À LA CRÈME
CREAM SAUCE
This is a sauce which goes ideally with a poached chicken, but may also be used for many other dishes, including fish, eggs, and vegetables.
Start as for a béchamel, melting 1 oz. butter in a heavy saucepan; as soon as it begins to foam stir in, off the fire, 2 tablespoons of sifted flour. When the mixture is smooth and palest yellow, start adding pink of hot clear broth taken from the pot in which the chicken is cooking. (Should some other, separately made stock, or milk, be used, always have it hot before adding it to the flour mixture.) Return to a low fire and stir patiently until your sauce is thick and smooth. Now add about 8 oz. (somewhat under pint) of cream and continue stirring. At this stage, the sauce looks much too thin but gradually, as you stir, it thickens. It will take about 20 minutes, over the lowest possible heat, before it is the right consistency. It need not be stirred continuously, only every now and again, in order to prevent a skin forming. Two or three minutes before serving, stir in 2 egg yolks well beaten with a little lemon juice. This addition greatly improves the sauce and gives it a final smoothness and finish. It may just be allowed to bubble once without risk of curdling, but not more. A little very finely chopped parsley and tarragon is a great improvement to the flavour.
This sauce may be poured over the carved chicken before serving, without fear of its developing the pasty looking, and tasting, quality of an ordinary white sauce.
SAUCE MORNAY
CHEESE SAUCE
To a straightforward béchamel, very lightly salted but well matured and reduced by lengthy and almost imperceptible cooking by the bain-marie system, add 2 heaped tablespoons of finely grated Parmesan or Gruyère cheese or, best of all, a mixture of half each. Once the cheese is added and thoroughly amalgamated with the béchamel, the sauce is ready and it is inadvisable to let it cook any further, for there is always a risk of the cheese either separating or turning lumpy. After adding the cheese, taste the sauce for seasoning, and add salt if necessary, plus a little extra freshly milled pepper and perhaps a scrap of cayenne.
Sauce mornay is always used as a sauce in which fish, vegetables, eggs and so on are reheated, usually in the oven, so it must have a certain consistency; it must not, however, be too thick (except in certain rare instances as for oysters mornay, described on page 316) or the finished dish will be pasty and stodgy.
BEURRE MAÎTRE D’HÔTEL
PARSLEY BUTTER
We all know how to make parsley butter. But do we always do it really well or know its many uses?
There should be about a tablespoon and a half of parsley to 2 oz. of butter and it should be very, very finely chopped. Then, in a bowl rinsed out with hot water, work your butter and parsley together with a fork, very thoroughly, adding a few drops of lemon juice, until you have an absolutely homogeneous pomade. Put it in the refrigerator or cool larder until you are ready to use it.
New potatoes or carrots with a little of this butter melting among them are exquisite. A dish of plain boiled white haricot beans, drained of their liquid and put back into a saucepan, with a lump of parsley butter added, make a lovely separate vegetable course. You just shake the pan and rotate it until the butter is at melting point. The same with those little dark green French lentils, lentilles d’Auvergne, for which the recipe is on page 262.
BEURRE BLANC NANTAIS
WHITE BUTTER AND SHALLOT SAUCE FOR FISH
The recipe for this wonderful butter and shallot sauce of Nantais and Angevin fish cookery is described in detail on pages 307-8.
BEURRE DE MONTPELLIER
GREEN BUTTER
Recipes for this mixture vary a good deal, as it is a sauce which has undergone a number of changes during the last hundred odd years, early versions containing no butter at all