ALSO BY RAYMOND SOKOLOV With the Grain The Jewish American Kitchen How to Cook: An Easy and Imaginative Guide for the Beginner Fading Feast: A Compendium of Disappearing American Regional Foods Wayward Reporter: The Life of A. J. Liebling Native Intelligence Great Recipes from The New York Times THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Copyright © 1976 by Raymond A. Sokolov All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sokolov, Raymond A. The saucier’s apprentice. 1. Sauces. 2. Cookery, French. I. Title. TX819.A1S64 1976 641.8′14 75-34281 eISBN: 978-0-307-76480-5 Published March 29, 1976 Reprinted Seventeen Times v3.1 To my friends, who came to dinner with “vino et sale et omnibus cachinnis” Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Genealogies Acknowledgments Hors-d’Oeuvre A Brief History of French Sauces How to Use This Book Brown Sauces Small or Compound Brown Sauces White Sauces Sauces Derived from Ordinary Velouté Sauces Derived from Chicken Velouté Sauces Derived from Fish Fumet and Velouté The Béchamel Family The Emulsified Sauces Hollandaise and Its Cousins The Béarnaise Group An Anatomy of Mayonnaise Butter Sauces Compound Butters Dessert Sauces Fruit Sauces Miscellaneous Genealogies Brown Sauces Sauces Derived from Ordinary Velouté Sauces Derived from Chicken Velouté Sauces Derived from Fish Fumet and Velouté The Béchamel Family Acknowledgments George Lang encouraged me at the beginning. My editor, Judith Jones, applauded the results of an early testing ordeal conducted under semi-tropical conditions in the New York summer heat; and then she continued to support the project with her well-known good taste and with friendly dollops of criticism. I am grateful to Earl Tidwell for his skillful work in designing the book. Sal’s Market in Brooklyn Heights and the Fulton Retail Fish Market in Manhattan responded gallantly to some bizarre requests. E. Dehillerin, the legendary Parisian kitchenware concern, kindly permitted me to use illustrations from one of their antique catalogues. Mainly, however, I want to thank Margaret, Michael, and Joseph for submitting to months of late dinners and to an enforced period of gastronomic time travel backwards into the nineteenth century. Hors-d’Oeuvre Having fled London and the odor of fried bread, I first set foot in France in the summer of 1960, famished from the boat train, unable to speak three words of the language, without maps or reservation, and a little terrified. Somehow I negotiated the Metro and found a phenomenally cheap and garish room in a Left Bank hotel garni. Settled in that small garret, at eye level with a forest of chimney pots and mansards, I attempted to repair the ravages of the Channel crossing and promptly burnt out my electric razor on the unexpectedly high Parisian voltage. I would grow a beard. I was nineteen. There wasn’t time to shave. I was too hungry—for life, but mainly for dinner. Down the oblate, winding stair, past the whiskered hag concierge and around the corner, they were waiting for me: a family of Basques with a cheap menu. Tournedos bordelaise could be had, “bleeding,” as I learned to say, for the equivalent of $1.50. That night, I knew enough to know that I had ordered some kind of steak. From bordelaise, I knew not. I was, however, aware that the French distinguished their food with “sauces,” but it was not until the little barded tournedos was brought, aswim in a lush and velvet medium, that I began to understand what had been meant by those groans of retrospective pleasure which the racy dowager next door to us in Detroit had emitted involuntarily as she regaled us with lengthy accounts of her unstinted banquets in Michelin’s three-starred temples. “Oh, the sauces!” And, oh, that bordelaise of my first night in France. I am certain, now, that it must have been third-rate: padded with tomato, unskimmed and murky, chalky with raw flour. But I remember a taste of extreme purity, an excitement that, along with the thrill of mainlining the French language, held me captive in Paris for the next two months, impelled me to return to work there some years later, and has most recently produced the work at hand. The point is that one sauce led to another. I have stopped counting them, for who but a drudge would want to keep records of any but the supreme (no pun intended): an earthy, witty choron chez Paul Bocuse; the startling and powerful brown sauce with charolais beef at Troisgros in Roanne; and its cousin, barbed slightly with pepper for the venison, at Illhaeusern. Great chefs, it goes without saying, still continue the art of the saucier, the sauce chef. And we pay them in bundles for their efforts, because we agree (to paraphrase Brillat-Savarin) that a great meal without a sauce is like a beautiful woman without clothes. It can provoke and satisfy the appetite, but it lacks the coating of civilization that would arouse our fullest interest. I know that there are people who say that raw materials of the highest order are the key to a good meal. I agree that a perfect peach is a fine thing, and I say also that the decline of the tomato in these United States vitiates the quality of what we eat beyond the rescue of a mere cook’s ingenuity. But there is another side (at least one) to this question. A cook can make a difference. A custard is more than the sum of its yolk and sugar parts. The play of the culinary intellect yields a palatable profit on the plate. And it is nonsense to say that complex results are not just as tasty and more interesting than simple ones. A sauce, in other words, adds something, really two things: a taste as well as the opportunity to think about how the thing was made. This is the same kind of pleasure we derive when we look at a painting; the eye is pleased, while the mind explores the esthetic windings of a technique and a willed structure. French sauces are the height of culinary technique, as anyone who has made a hollandaise already knows. They are also part of a structure so orderly and Cartesian that it could only be French. Let me be clear on this point, for it is the only real point I have to make. French sauces are not just a group of randomly assembled essences and emulsions. They come in families, each one of which descends from one basic sauce known appropriately as a sauce mere or mother sauce. Once you have made the mother sauce (which is rarely served by itself), you can make all the small or compound sauces (the ones that are served) in a matter of minutes by adding the appropriate special ingredients that make up the particular sauce. For example, once you have prepared a batch of brown sauce (jus de veau, espagnole or demi-glace), all you have to do to produce sauce madère (Madeira sauce) is to add Madeira. The sauce system is like a group of family trees that evolved over centuries and reached their fullest elaboration in the late nineteenth century. The system was codified by Escoffier after World War I, and it is still the basis for what is called haute cuisine or classic cuisine in France today. Now it is a fact that younger chefs in France have radically “simplified” their menus and no longer cook precisely in the manner of Escoffier. They have dropped the fussy garnishes that used to accompany food served in important restaurants. And, as far as sauces are concerned, they have eliminated or virtually eliminated flour as a thickening agent for the mother sauces. Instead, they reduce their stocks further and use other liaisons: cream, butter, hollandaise and egg yolks, as well as arrowroot. This amounts to a fundamental change of direction. Its proponents assert that flour muddied the taste of the (now) old-fashioned espagnoles and veloutés. They go on to say that the streamlined nature of modern life demands lighter sauces that do not overwhelm the basic elements of the dish which the sauce accompanies. These arguments are persuasive up to a point. Flour-bound sauces do tend to be more present as a complex taste and a texture than do sauces based on pure reductions of veal stock. On the other hand, in my opinion it is a slander on the past and an error to dismiss 150 years of professional saucemaking as a muddy, glutinous botch. For one thing, the antiflour faction never mention that they are saving at least a day’s labor every time they do not add roux to stock to make their sauce bases. They don’t have to pay someone to stay by the big stock pot skimming for hours at a stretch. True, they do have to use more bones and meat to get their effects, but materials for stock are far less expensive than the salaries of today’s restaurant personnel. Secondly, a well-made demi-glace, which is the highest refinement of brown sauce, does not taste of flour, is not oppressively heavy, and does not overpower the flavors of other foods. To prove this, I have several times set two sauce boats on the table, one containing a demi-glace based sauce, the other filled with the same sauce prepared from an unthickened “mother.” Then, I served double portions of the same dish, one with the old-fashioned sauce, the other with the modern sauce.