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

228 Pages·1976·1.89 MB·English

by  Raymond Sokolov

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: 978-0-30776480-5
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.