Marinière Sauce

Sauce Marinière (sailor-style sauce) teaches the discipline of a liaison, a binding of egg yolks into a hot sauce. Heat builds the base, then restraint finishes it. Know this before you touch the pan: once the yolks enter, the sauce must never boil.

The original assumed a saucier on staff, fish fumet never off the fire, and Sauce Bercy (No. 65) waiting by the pint. At home, prepare that referenced sauce separately, then let one broad saucepan and a whisk handle this derivative. Keeping several base sauces hot through service was brigade scaffolding and can go; the book's proportions and the off-heat liaison are the dish, and both stay. The exact ratio is multiplied by three here, giving six cups of Sauce Bercy (No. 65), one and a half cups of mussel liquor, and nine yolks. It finishes at about two quarts. One cook, one stove, one evening.

The finished Marinière should be pale butter-gold, glossy enough to cling lightly to a mussel shell, and alive with the saline depth of the cooking liquor without becoming heavy. Strain that liquor meticulously, then pull the saucepan completely off the heat before tempering the yolks. That pause is the step that decides the sauce.