French Provincial Cooking (25 page)

(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, of clear well-flavoured veal or chicken stock; to this sauce is sometimes added a proportion of cream and it becomes, in fact, a simplified version of
sauce velouté.

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.

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.

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.

The recipe for this wonderful butter and shallot sauce of Nantais and Angevin fish cookery is described in detail on pages 307-8.

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 and a much larger proportion of hard-boiled egg yolks and olive oil. One current version is as follows:

Weigh approximately 4 oz. altogether of the following herbs: leaves of watercress, tarragon, parsley, chervil and spinach, in about equal proportions. If chervil is unobtainable, substitute more parsley. Burnet
(pimprenelle),
a herb with a faint taste of cucumber, is mentioned in many recipes but is seldom to be found nowadays.

Plunge all the herbs into boiling water for half a minute. Drain and squeeze as dry as possible. Pound in a mortar, adding 6 anchovy fillets, 2 tablespoons of capers, 4 miniature gherkins, the yolks of 1 raw and 3 hard-boiled eggs and lastly 4 oz. of butter. Force all this through a fine wire sieve. To the thick pomade so obtained add, slowly, 5 to 6 tablespoons of olive oil and a few drops of lemon juice. The sauce will keep some days in a covered jar in the refrigerator but should be removed some while before serving, or it will be too hard.

Montpellier butter is usually served with salmon and the chef’s way of doing it is to have a fine piece of middle cut of cold salmon with the skin removed, and the fish thickly spread with the green butter.

It can also be served separately with hot salmon or any grilled fish, as one would serve parsley butter. A teaspoon of Montpellier butter added to eggs cooked
en cocotte
is also very delicious. This quantity should make sufficient to serve four to six people.

This is a thickening or binding for sauces, not a sauce in itself. Quantities are 1 oz. of butter to
oz. of flour. Mix the two together very thoroughly with a fork until you have a perfectly amalgamated paste. Divide this mixture into little knobs and spread these on the surface of the sauce to be thickened, which should be bubbling gently. Instead of stirring, lift the pan from the fire, shake and rotate it and, in a few seconds, the sauce will have thickened, taking on a shining and somewhat sticky appearance. Thereafter, do not let the sauce boil again but serve the dish as quickly as possible. If it has to be kept waiting, keep it barely moving over the lowest possible heat for, while it is quite in order for the sauce in which
beurre manié
is used to be on the boil just for a moment, further boiling is apt to spoil the taste. A typical dish in which the sauce is thickened with the butter and flour mixture is the
coq au vin
on page 399.

The origin of
sauce béarnaise
has already been explained in the introductory chapter on the cookery of south-western France. Here is the recipe:

The yolks of 3 or 4 eggs, 4 to 5 oz. butter, half a wineglass (4 or 5 tablespoons) of white wine, 2 tablespoons of tarragon vinegar, 2 shallots, black pepper, salt, lemon juice, a few leaves of fresh tarragon.

Put the white wine, vinegar, chopped shallots and a little ground black pepper in a small pan and reduce it by fast boiling to about 2 tablespoons. Strain it and add a few drops of cold water. Put this essence in the top half of a double saucepan or in a bowl which will fit into the top of an ordinary saucepan. This underneath saucepan should be half full of warm water and put on to a gentle flame. To the liquid already in the top pan, aud half the butter, cut into small pieces. Let it melt quickly, then add the rest, stirring all the time. Now add, gradually, the beaten yolks of the eggs and stir very carefully until the sauce thickens. Add salt if necessary, which will depend on whether the butter used is salted or unsalted, and a few drops of lemon juice and a few of cold water. Take the sauce from the fire and stir in the chopped tarragon, and the sauce is ready. At no time should the water underneath the sauce boil and the sauce is not intended to be served hot, but tepid.

Mint instead of tarragon turns
béarnaise
into
paloise,
a modern variation, useful for serving with lamb and mutton.

If you should be obliged to make your
béarnaise
in advance the least risky way of reheating it is to put the bowl which contains it inside another one containing hot water and stir it for a few seconds, but not over a flame. Never mind if the sauce is not very hot; it is better to have it cool than curdled.

Here we get to a vexed question. Purists claim that the one and only true
hollandaise
sauce should consist of nothing but butter, egg yolks and lemon juice. The truth is that the basic
hollandaise
is apt to be insipid and many cooks have discovered that the addition of a preliminary reduction of white wine or vinegar, as in a
béarnaise,
makes a better flavoured sauce. This was the alternative method suggested by Prosper Montagné, and by Madame Saint-Ange in her
Livre de Cuissne.

In a small pan put 3 tablespoons of wine vinegar (I prefer to use white wine if I happen to have a bottle open) and 2 tablespoons of cold water. Reduce it by boiling to one scant tablespoon. Add half a tablespoon of cold water. Have ready beaten in a bowl the yolks of 3 large eggs and, on a warmed plate, between 6 and 7 oz. of the finest unsalted butter, divided into 6 or 7 portions.

Into the top half of a double saucepan or into a china or glass bowl which will equally fit into the bottom half of the double saucepan which contains the hot water, put the cooled reduction of vinegar or wine. Add the yolks. Stir thoroughly. Set the whole apparatus over the heat. Add one portion of butter. Stir until it starts to thicken before adding the next portion, and so on until all is used up. Do not allow the water underneath the saucepan to boil and, if you see that the sauce is thickening too quickly, add a few drops of cold water. The finished sauce should coat the back of the spoon. Season with salt and a few drops of lemon juice.