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By Root 1114 0

was dished up, Clémence glanced at the béarnaise and realized that the egg yolks had been forgotten. No time to make a fresh sauce; the mistake – which tasted surprisingly good – was sent up. After dinner Clémence was summoned to the dining-room. She arrived red-faced and ashamed, expecting trouble. Instead, the ‘new sauce’ was praised. She was asked to repeat the mistake many times, and when she left the château to open a restaurant at la Chébuette, a mile or two away on the banks of the Loire, her beurre blanc soon became a speciality of the region, from Nantes to Angers and Tours.

As you would expect, beurre blanc is served with shad, brochet and salmon from the Loire. Try it, too, with saltwater fish such as turbot, sole, John Dory, brill and whiting. The fish should be poached in a half-wine, half-water court bouillon*, baked in foil, or braised. Not a sauce for fried fish.

The trick consists in not overheating the sauce, which is very much a last-minute sauce. The first time you make it, have a bowl of ice cubes handy for quickly cooling the base of the pan. Make a reduction of wine vinegar and shallots as for the béarnaise sauce*. Cut up 250 g (8 oz) butter, chilled until firm, into cubes. Whisk in the butter, bit by bit, keeping the heat very low; it should melt to a cream – raise the pan from the stove to make sure it does not get too hot. Season to taste.

If you have a total collapse, don’t despair. Beat a couple of egg yolks in a basin over a pan of simmering water, and add the butter/ shallot mixture gradually until you have the thicker and yellower sauce more usually known as hollandaise*.

SAUCE À LA CRÉOLE

A tomato sauce made sweeter, and a little hotter, by the addition of peppers and a discreet seasoning of chillis.

250 g (½ lb) chopped onion

2 large stalks celery, chopped

3 fresh red peppers, seeded, chopped or 4 canned peppers

1 small green chilli or ½ teaspoon crushed hot chilli flakes

60 g (2 oz) butter

1 kg (2 lb 3 oz) can of tomatoes

thyme

salt, pepper

basil

Fry the onion, celery, peppers and chilli in the butter, gently at first until they begin to soften, then a little more strongly until they brown lightly. Pour in the contents of the can of tomatoes, add a sprig or two of thyme, plenty of freshly ground black pepper and only a little salt (because the sauce is to be reduced). Leave the lid off the pan so that the liquid has a chance to evaporate, and cook until the sauce becomes a stew.

Remove the sprigs of thyme, check the seasoning and add more salt or chilli flakes if required. Add a final chopping of fresh basil.

Like the marinara sauce*, sauce à la créole makes an excellent basis for fish stews. When the flavour is to your liking, add some lightly-browned fish such as turbot, brill, hake, shark, monkfish, or squid, and cook for another 5 or 10 minutes. (See Sunfish à la créole p. 474.) If using mussels or clams, open them in a large saucepan and remove the shells, before adding them to the sauce – stir in the strained shellfish liquor too.

THREE GOOSEBERRY SAUCES

These gooseberry sauces and the sorrel ones below have a remarkably similar taste, as Elizabeth David remarks in French Provincial Cooking. The two acidites are interchangeable. I must confess, though, to never having eaten gooseberry sauce with salmon, because when the fruit is at its small, acid-green best, salmon is unpleasantly expensive. Mackerel, at their finest, arrive with the first gooseberries; nobody can complain at the price of either, though Parson Woodforde, the greediest of Norfolk parsons in the eighteenth century, did complain, in his diary, when the spring was late and he had to eat the first mackerel of the season without gooseberry sauce.

In spite of this, it is the French and not the English who christened this hardy, fruit groseille à maquereau – which is odd, at first sight, because the gooseberry grows super-abundantly in the British Isles (and indeed as far north as the Arctic Circle), and gooseberry sauces are more common in our old cookery books