France.
Swirl cold butter into a hot reduction off the heat and the sauce turns glossy and thick. Let it boil and it splits into grease and liquid in seconds.
French professional cooking was codified in two waves. Antonin Carême, early in the nineteenth century, classified sauces and built the grand architecture of haute cuisine; Auguste Escoffier, in Le Guide culinaire of 1903, simplified it, fixed the five mother sauces (XXII.5), the stocks behind them (XXII.1) and the kitchen brigade (XXXI.1), and wrote down several thousand recipes as variations of a few techniques. Alongside it ran cuisine bourgeoise and the regional cooking of the provinces — the butter and cream of Normandy, the duck fat of the southwest, the olive oil and garlic of Provence — which supplied most of what French people actually ate.
The technique French cooks lean on more than any other is the emulsion (X.1). A pan sauce (XXII.7) is finished by monter au beurre: the pan taken off the heat and cold butter whisked in piece by piece, so that its fat disperses as tiny droplets in the reduced liquid, held there by the butter's own milk proteins and by the gelatin of the stock. The more butter, the thicker and glossier the sauce, as the droplets crowd together (X.2). Beurre blanc is the same idea with a reduction of wine, vinegar and shallots and much more butter (X.5). Too cold and the butterfat sets; too hot, above about 85–90 °C, and the emulsion breaks. The workshop mounts a sauce.
Below: the thickness of a sauce made by whisking the butter you choose into 100 mL of reduction (butter 82 % fat; volume fraction of fat; Krieger–Dougherty suspension law, as in X.1), and what the emulsion does at the holding temperature you choose (teaching bands for butter emulsions).
- Describe how French cooking was codified.
- Finish a sauce with butter.
- Make beurre blanc.
- Hold a butter emulsion at the right temperature.
Off the heat, cold butter, keep it warm
In the colloid model 40 g of butter in 100 mL of reduction thickens it about 2.2 times — a light, glossy pan sauce; 150 g, the proportions of beurre blanc, brings the fat fraction to 0.52 and the thickness to about 11 times, a sauce that coats a spoon. The same physics says why the butter goes in cold and off the heat: it melts slowly as it is whisked, dispersing as fine droplets instead of pooling, and the pan stays below the breaking temperature.
Beurre blanc for 4: boil 60 mL dry white wine, 60 mL white wine vinegar and 2 finely chopped shallots until only 2 tbsp of syrupy liquid remain. Off the heat, or over the lowest heat, whisk in 200 g cold unsalted butter in cubes, a few at a time, adding more only as each melts into the sauce; it should stay creamy, never bubbling. Season with salt and white pepper, strain if you like, and hold in a warm (not hot) place — a vacuum flask or a bowl over warm water at about 60–70 °C. If it splits from heat, whisk it a spoonful at a time into a tablespoon of cold cream or water. Pan sauce: deglaze the fond (VIII.7), reduce, then finish with 20–40 g cold butter off the heat.
Make a small pan sauce and divide it: finish half with cold butter off the heat and bring the other half back to a boil after adding butter. Compare.
Terms
- Monter au beurre
- Finishing a sauce by whisking in cold butter.
- Beurre blanc
- A wine-shallot reduction emulsified with much butter.
- Fond
- Stock, the "foundation" of French sauces.
- Brigade
- The kitchen's organised team of stations.
Sources
- A. Escoffier, Le Guide culinaire, 1903 (English translation, The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery, 1979).
- H. McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2nd ed., Scribner, 2004.
- A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.