Beurre Blanc Is A Traditional French Sauce That's Not As Old As You Might Expect

Beurre blanc, or "white butter" in French, is the perfect sauce for seafood (and most other things, really). It's a simple mixture of butter, white wine, shallots, white vinegar, and some salt and pepper. Other versions will sometimes include heavy cream or lemon juice to give it more robustness. Beurre blanc has become a popular reduction widely used across any kitchen serving seafood, but while it is a modern cooking staple of French origin, it's actually not one of the traditional French "mother sauces."

The mother sauces are tomato sauce, hollandaise, béchamel, velouté, and espagnole. All have a liquid, thickener, and seasoning. Most of these require a roux, meaning they have flour, but beurre blanc doesn't need it at all. Its sweetness and acidity are its strengths. Beurre blanc also didn't enter the cooking scene until sometime around the late 19th to early 20th century.

Its origin is an alleged accident. In La Chebuette, a hamlet by the Loire River, Chef Clémence Lefeuvre invented the beurre blanc when she forgot to add eggs to her béarnaise sauce for a pike dish — that's how the story goes, anyway. It would be a disservice to simply think of beurre blanc as a messed up béarnaise because the two recipes are also cooked differently. Béarnaise uses already liquified butter, and beurre blanc requires cold butter to slowly be cooked into the sauce.

Beurre blanc uses common household ingredients, and all you have to do is mix them together, right? The main issue chefs run into when making this sauce is the timing and heat ratio. The use of vinegar without any thickening agents can cause the sauce to destabilize, which is why some chefs opt to add heavy cream to the recipe. Don't make the cardinal mistake of cooking with white wine by not allowing it to cook all the way through — or else your beurre blanc may taste like beurre blech instead. When done correctly, this sauce adds a rich and tangy flavor to seafood, vegetable, pasta, and poultry-based dishes.

Not much is known about the beurre blanc's creator, but thanks to Chef Clémence Lefeuvre's gastronomic contribution, the sauce has been able to take a life of its own and make a mark on the culinary world for over a century now. Next time you buy salmon at the grocery store, consider preparing it with the tasty and deceptively simple beurre blanc. Besides, who doesn't love a recipe where you can drink the wine you use to cook?