French Provincial Cooking (24 page)

Apart from all these alternatives, there is the whole repertory of cold sauces derived either from mayonnaise or more simply from vinaigrette, and all the butters flavoured with herbs and aromatics, of which
maître d’hôtel
or parsley butter is the simplest form.

So it will be seen that between the stock-pot sauces of the restaurant and the gravy browning and water of the old-fashioned English domestic cook, between the rich and complicated
coulis d’écrevisses
which is considered a fitting accompaniment to salmon in grand French cookery, and the bottled horrors of our own boarding-house tables, there is a world of delicious sauces, fresh and easily made, designed to help the food with which they are served rather than to drown it. And so long as the ingredients used are of good quality, no artificial colourings and no substitutes in the way of tinned or bottled stuff being allowed, so long as the seasoning and blending has been done with a light hand and good judgment, these simple sauces of home cookery will be more appreciated than all the grandiose confections of the now out-dated and overrated
haute cuisine
.

Anyone who can produce even the few easy sauces described in this chapter and serve them with well-cooked grills or roasts, poached or fried fish or even eggs or sausages, will soon get a reputation for that kind of unpretentious, good quality food which the French so descriptively call
une cuisine soignée.

The
bouillon
from the
pot-au-feu
(see page 156) is often used in household cookery as a basis for sauces, but when you have no such meat stock available and when it is necessary to make a foundation for a sauce independently of the ingredients of the dish which it is to accompany, the following method will produce a well-flavoured clear stock without any great expense either of time or materials. It is a method simplified to the greatest possible degree for household cookery.

The ingredients are:
lb. each of lean stewing veal, preferably from the shin, and good quality minced beef; 2 scraped carrots, 2 halved tomatoes, 2 medium-sized onions, washed but not peeled, 2 sprigs of parsley with the stalks; no salt or pepper until a later stage.

Put all the ingredients in a small pot or saucepan which will go in the oven; cover with just over a pint of water. Cover the pot and cook in a low oven for 1
hours. Strain through an ordinary sieve. Leave in a bowl until the fat has set. Remove the fat. Heat up the stock, strain through a muslin to get rid of any sediment. There should now be about
pint of clear straw-coloured
bouillon
ready to make any sauce requiring stock.

As it has been cooked without salt, it can also be reduced to a thick syrup-like consistency, a sort of improvised meat glaze or
glace de viande,
in the following manner: put a large soup ladle of the
bouillon
into a 6-inch frying-pan or sauté pan. Let it bubble fairly gently for about 10 minutes, during which time you remove the little flecks of scum which come to the surface with a metal spoon dipped frequently in hot water. When the liquid starts to stick to the spoon and is reduced to about 2 tablespoons, it is done. The flavour is now three times as strong as it was to start with but, of course, had there been salt in it, it would have been uneatable. Pour it into a little jar, keep it covered, and when it is to be used heat it up in the jar standing in a pan of water. Although this has not the deep colour of professional meat glaze, it has the right amount of body to strengthen a sauce, plus a freshness and clarity of flavour unusual in the lengthily cooked, more elaborate confection of the chefs.

For large households the stock can be made in double quantities, and for the reduction to glaze, use a larger, 10-inch pan. For one of its best uses, see the recipe for
sauce bercy
on page 114.

Under this name Mique Grandchamp, author of
Le Cuisinier à la Bonne Franquette
(1884) gives us a useful idea for conserving and making the best use of a small quantity of meat glaze.

Uncork a bottle of Madeira, pour out one wineglassful, and put the bottle in a pan of warm water; bring the water slowly to the boil and, when the wine is hot, pour in gradually a wineglass of melted meat glaze; put the cork back in the bottle and leave it in a warm place near the stove for two hours. This makes a valuable standby for adding to sauces, particularly those which are to be served with game, and for all manner of dishes where a little extra flavouring is required. The mixture can be stored almost indefinitely but, of course, a half-bottle or even less still goes quite a long way.

This is to serve with wild or domestic duck.
Bigarade
is the French name for bitter oranges.

Two Seville oranges, a teacupful of veal or game stock, 1 oz. of butter, 1 tablespoon of flour, 4 lumps of sugar, salt and pepper.

Pare the rind of the oranges very thinly, cut into fine shreds, plunge them into boiling water and boil 5 minutes. Strain. Prepare a brown
roux
by melting the butter in a small saucepan, stirring in the flour and continuing to stir over a gentle flame until the mixture is quite smooth and turns café au lait colour; now add half the warmed stock, stir again, then add the other half. Cook very gently another 5 minutes. Add the seasonings, the strained juice of one of the oranges and the peel. A few drops of Madeira or port added at the last moment are an improvement and the juices which have come from the bird while roasting should also be added.

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.

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.

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.

 

(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.