Choice Cookery

intended to mask meat or poultry, the long, slow simmering producing an extreme blandness not to be attained by a quicker method. But circumstances sometimes prevent the previous preparation of the sauce, in which case it may be made exactly in the same way, only instead of a pint of broth, but three gills should be poured on the butter and flour, and a gill of thick cream stirred in when it boils; the sauce is finished when it again reaches the boiling-point. This is the foundation for the following "grand" sauces: Poulette, Allemande, Uxelles, Soubise, Ste. Menehould, Perigueux, Supreme, besides all the simpler ones, which take their name from the chief ingredient, such as caper, cauliflower, celery, lobster, etc., etc. For sauces that have vinegar or lemon juice, it is better that the veloute, or white sauce, should have no cream until the last minute, or it may curdle. My object in giving the recipes for sauces in the way I intend--that is to say, by building on to, or omitting from, one foundation sauce--is to dispel some of the confusion which exists in the minds of many people about the exact difference between several sauces differing from each other very slightly--a confusion which is only added to by reading over the fully written recipes for each, as many a painstaking, intelligent woman's headache will testify. As we progress, the exact difference between each will be explained. _Bechamel._--This sauce differs from the white sauce only in the fact that the white stock used for the latter need not be very strong; for bechamel it should either be very strong or boiled down rapidly to make it so, and there should always be half cream instead of one third, as in white sauce, and when required for fish the stock may be of fish. White sauce is frequently (perhaps most frequently) made with milk, or milk and cream, in place of stock, in this country, and answers admirably for many purposes, but would not be what is required for the kind of cooking intended in these pages. Most readers know