I like you sauce… Dutch style!

I wonder how many people actually make sauces – I don’t mean boil a kettle and pour hot water onto some powder from a sachet, or just microwave the contents of a different sachet, I mean actually making a sauce, maybe with a roux, or maybe thickened with eggs…

In old cookery books there are pages and pages of different sauces – for example in the book I’m currently looking at – tomato sauce, apple sauce, marmalade sauce, onion sauce, custard sauce, cooked salad dressing – is that a sauce? white sauce, bread sauce and then Dutch sauce.

I’ve been to the Netherlands so many times, staying with a friend who is a wonderful cook, and visiting her family who are also great cooks, and going for meals in super restaurants, but I don’t think I have ever had Dutch sauce as described in this book:

Dutch sauce

• 1 oz butter/margarine/oil etc
• 1 oz flour
• ½ pint fish stock
• 1 egg yolk
• juice of ½ lemon
• salt and pepper

1. melt fat, add flour and cook as a roux
2. add liquid stirring very well
3. bring to the boil and add the rest of the ingredients
4. beat very well and serve…

… serve with what? I am guessing some sort of fish and when I look back in the cookery book to the fish section there it suggests serving the sauce with:

• baked fish (cod, halibut, hake, plaice, salmon)
• baked fillets of sole
• grilled fish (finnan haddock, herring, kipper, mackerel, trout, fillets of place, sole halibut, salmon)
• steamed fish

I guess because there was less variety of food items available people ad to be more imaginative and creative!

(The cooked salad dressing, by the way was flour, egg, mustard, salt and sugar mixed in a bowl, added to milk, vinegar and water, cooked over a bain marie, double boiler, or bowl over a pan of simmering water, with some butter/margarine/lard and stirred until thick… served cold… I think probably not!)