Glazings

Glaçages (glazings) teach one clean lesson: the food and sauce are cooked before they meet fierce top heat. You are not baking a casserole. You are creating a thin golden film almost at once, before the sauce underneath can boil or throw off its butter. That timing is the dish.

The original method assumed a saucier with warm sauce ready, a stockpot never off the fire, and a salamander that struck the surface with immediate heat. At home, one cup of finished sauce, a fully heated broiler, and a shallow bain-marie (water bath) do the same work for four. Keeping several sauces alive through service was brigade scaffolding and can go; the hot base, the water buffer, and the swift finish must stay. One cook, one stove, one evening.

Choose one of two glaçages. Whisk butter into a suitable finished sauce and color it bare, or cover the food with Mornay Sauce (No. 91), then add grated cheese and melted butter. Do not combine the routes. The step that decides everything is preheating the broiler until the surface colors in seconds rather than simmering underneath.