There was possibly no more cautious young man in London the day I started my new job at the Ritz. For a young chef, sauce-making is an arduous affair —twelve or fourteen hours spent near a hot range can sometimes seem to stretch out forever. Moreover, to an assistant saucier, the head chef on his tasting rounds is formidable—a man whose wrath may descend on you at any moment. He can detect the least carelessness or lack of skill on your part and, if my own experience is a good example, undoubtedly has a Gallic temper, more easily lost than regained.
But for an eager amateur of cookery in his own kitchen, sauce-making can be pure pleasure. The home cook may approach his sauces in a leisurely way, mastering them one by one. No meal will require more than one or two sauces, and some sauces may be made in quantity and stored in the refrigerator for almost a week, to be reheated when the need for them arises. While learning to be a professional saucier certainly has its harrowing moments, the amateur saucier will be spared the pain of denunciation for his shortcomings and will have instead the delight of being praised by family and friends for his achievement and progress.
If you have been working at these cooking lessons, you have already become familiar with two simple, easily made sauces: the vinaigrette or French dressing, a cold sauce for salads, cold vegetables, and fish, and the sauces made in the pan in which meats have been sautéed. So your next step—and the subject of this lesson—is to learn the principles of making the basic white sauces and brown sauces so indispensable to French cuisine.
White sauces and brown sauces have two characteristics in common. Both are thickened with a roux of flour cooked in fat; to prepare either, after heating the sauce until it thickens, you reduce, or boil down, the liquid to improve flavor and texture. In other respects, these sauces fall into separate groups. White sauces are made with a roux blond, or white roux, and with milk or white stock. Brown sauces arc made with a roux brun, or brown roux, and with brown stock or tomatoes. In each of these groups, two basic sauces serve as the foundation for all the others. They arc béchamel and velouté sauce in the white-sauce group and basic brown and tomato sauce in the brownsauce group. When you learn how to make these four basic sauces and how to vary them skillfully, you are on the road to becoming a saucier.
All sauce-making requires the same utensils and tools. First and foremost, the saucepan must be of heavy metal, as sauces scotch easily in a thin, lightweight pan, even with constant stirring. Use a two-and-a-half quart saucepan, preferably with a rounded bottom, for making a quart or more of sauce and a one-quart pan for making one to two cups. Smaller pans than these are not convenient, and a sauce is less likely to scorch around the edges if (here are no sharp corners for it to hide in. You naturally need measuring cups and spoons. A French chef uses a wire whip to stir the liquid into the roux and to mix the sauce while it thickens; then he changes to a wooden spoon or wooden spatula—a tool with a fiat, squared off end—to continue stirring during the reduction.
As for the ingredients, I can't be too emphatic about the importance of quality. Even the best of chefs needs fresh, pure materials to produce a good sauce. By skillful manipulation he can manage with a poor range and inadequate utensils, but never with off-flavor butter, milk, or eggs, stale mushrooms, or tomatoes that have started to soften. If you make your own stock, use only fresh bones, meat, and poultry; if you buy canned consomme or bouillon cubes, select a reputable brand. To make the roux, nothing compares with butter, although in the interest of economy good beef or pork fat is acceptable for brown sauces. For white sauces only butter will do—good butter.
Properly cooked sauces are light and smooth, never heavy, gummy, or pasty. They are subtle in flavor and free of grease. If you follow these directions, you should be able to achieve the outstanding characteristics a good sauce must possess. First comes the roux. Equal amounts of butter and Hour in the proportion of two level tablespoons of each for each cup of sauce will make a produce that is moderately thick and has no excess fat floating on the surface. The butter should be melted but not sizzling when you add the flour and the roux must be cooked very slowly and stirred constantly. Quick cooking shrivels the grains of starch in the flour and impairs the quality of the final sauce. Use more liquid than the amount of sauce desired and cook the mixture down to the correct quantity. This reduction extracts and blends the flavors of the ingredients more thoroughly, while the long cooking of the starch gives the sauce a smoother, more velvety texture. Heat the liquid before adding it to the roux to obtain a quicker and more thorough liaison of fat and flour with liquid. Cook the sauce slowly and whip it briskly with a wire whip as you add the liquid, then continue to stir it while it thickens. While the sauce reduces, it needs to be stirred only often enough to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan. A sauce made this way will have what the French call du corps, body, or à la nappe, the ability to coat food without running off.
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