saucy

Oh dear, I am such a slow learner....  In feudal times I studied for an HND in Institutional Management, and if this floods your mind with old fashioned images, you'd be right.  Messages imparted to us were along the lines of: girls who sit on tables don't get married.  Anyway, a big chunk of this invaluable course was cookery.  This was where I first learned how to make sauces:  blond roux, white roux, brown roux -all were worthy endeavours.  And of course the béchamel - the French language is so seductive, isn't it? - essentially a white sauce but one where the milk has been infused with an onion piqué (an onion with cloves stuck in it), along with bay leaves and black peppercorns.

Anyway, and I am slowly progressing towards the point of this post, for years the béchamel remained in my consciousness as the gold standard 'base' for any successful sauce.  And this is where I have gone so horribly wrong with my cooking.  Yes, the flavoured milk might have a strong part to play, but what about the flour that is subsequently mixed in with it?  What about the resulting thick white duvets that for decades I have poured over so many meat and fish dishes, endangering the breathing of any unsuspecting partakers?




During the past year I have been the recipient of the most delicious sauces from restaurants in towns as diverse as Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, Edinburgh and Lyon in France.  I have savoured those tastes and wondered wistfully why I'm not capable of producing anything like them.













I would like to say that I had a flash of inspiration, but in fact it was my partner who stated what now seems to me to be glaringly, embarrassingly obvious: one of the reasons those sauces are so divine is their absence of flour.  On hearing this,  I rushed on to the internet to check up ingredients for dishes such as ravioli served with a mushroom and marsala sauce, moving on to check out Hollandaise sauce, Berneaise sauce.  No suggestion of flour in any of these.  Plenty of cream, alcohol, olive oil and spices, but forget about the wheat grain or even the rice.  It's simple:  NO FLOUR.  No wheat flour, no gluten free flour, no tapioca flour, no potato flour.

And so at the weekend, I produced a chicken dish with an almond sauce:  simply a case of sauteeing shredded almonds in butter - I opted for the healthier olive oil in order to compensate for what was to follow - then smothering with a light blanket (not a duvet) of single cream, adding a little Tamari sauce.   I mixed it in with the chicken.  The result:  perhaps not the heaven I'd experienced in MishNish on Mull, or Earthy in Edinburgh, but certainly for a while I floated above the clouds.

Jane

P.S.  Conscience dictates that I add the fact that we were probably taught how to make sauces like Hollandaise at college, but it was the béchamel that remained in my consciousness.