The Saucier's Apprentice: A Modern Guide to Classic French Sauces for the Home

242 Pages·1976·1.84 MB·English

by  Sokolov Raymond A

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