Le Guide Culinaire - different palate, different time...?

[paul o' vendange]

Hi all,

 

I'm puttering a way back in.  I've read Escoffier but in all my life, though I've used, as many of us have, a world of techniques and recipes, etc., passed on by traditions following from him, I've never replicated much from the book.

 

Starting from the beginning.  I've NEVER put a grain of salt in any stock.  What he calls for in his white stock seems crazy to me.  I gulped and added the full measure (though I made chicken stock, which calls for additional carcasses, whole boiling hens, etc., which I did). 

 

It's a luscious stock.  Absolutely rich and an entire paradigm apart from the chicken stock I regularly use, which is a wetting agent, a braising liquid, a lighter basis for derivative sauces, etc.  As this stock stands, I would use it in potage, but cannot imagine reducing it for sauce purposes.  The salt is palpable, though it's "nice," I guess I'd say.  The stock tastes great. 

 

I also find it interesting Escoffier doesn't typically call for salt in his small sauces.  So it seems, salt in stock, watch it in saucemaking.

 

I've tried finding discussions about this on the web, even in French, and I came up empty - which also really surprises me.  Anyone else make his white stock?  Anyone else use salt in their stock?  Anyone else use it in this kind of ratio (60 g/12 litres water)?

 

Thanks.

[Paul Fink]

Funny I read the post three times still confused. By white sauce do you mean Bechamel  

I  understand the salt in the Bechamel 

A Bechamel needs salt .. just does.

But I never salt my meat stocks. 

The meat sauces are salted after they are reduced 

Escoffier die 1935. Things change. Maybe try a modern text like the CIA cookbook

[paul o' vendange]

Hey Paul -

 

Actually, I said white stock, not white sauce.  It's the second stock after estouffade (and his chicken is the same thing, with the addition of additional giblets and/or carcasses, and "three boiling fowls" - that's a lot of bird per gallon of water!!). 

 

I've worked across many spectrums, all of them, really, classically based.  But I've never cooked entirely true from Escoffier's work, to the word. I'm doing it because until I do, it's just a thought experiment, you know?  I can't know what it is, until doing it verbatim, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.  But I really am tripped out by not just the use of salt (I don't in my stocks, but many do - two immediately come to mind, Paul Bocuse, Judy Rodgers/Zuni Cafe Cookbook - lost her book years ago, but I seem to recall not only that she salts her stock, but against all orthodoxy, doesn't skim it at all - let's it cool scum and all overnight, then skims, if memory holds), but man - that's a lot of salt, or so it seems to me!  It will be nice to make some velouté and derivative sauces from this, to see how it works. 

 

Partially, I'm just trying to feel the Belle Époque - and imagine, their palates demanded a richer, fuller experience.  Partially, I love culinary history, the underlying reasons of why a certain gastronomy was as it was.  But here, as well, just curious if anyone else has literally worked Escoffer, and what their experience of this use of salt is.

 

Edit:  Equally astonishing, at least to me, is that I haven't found any discussion of this anywhere on the web.  I would have thought that given Escoffier's importance, and the importance of these stocks to French cuisine as we know it, there'd be more on this.  I just find it kind of jarring, but then I admit I can go in fits of obsession, when nature allows.

Edited March 31, 2017 by paul o' vendange (log)