Professional Masterchef this evening.  Call me picky if you will, but here's my draft letter to Ms Galetti and Mr Wallace....unfair?  the only reference on the web that I can find about the boiled juice is...surprise ...on a Roux website.  I wouldn't mind, but they are so precise about there being only one "classic" way to do everything!

Mr Greg Wallace and Ms. Monika Galetti
Professional Masterchef
BBC

I watched the Professional Masterchef programme this evening with great pleasure but was surprised to see the suggestion that the orange juice for a Sauce Maltaise should be boiled to concentrate the flavour, partly as I had never heard of this and partly as I would have thought that boiling would alter the actual blood orange flavour.

In our kitchen is a bookshelf with only around 100 books: the selection of books is very varied and does concentrate towards a number of writers, but it spans quite a wide range.  When a new book is acquired, another has to go – harsh but fair!

I thought that it would be amusing to trawl throught he likely candidates to find a reference to boiling the orange juice when making a sauce Maltaise.  Here is the list of books that I consulted.

 The recipes that suggested fresh juice and zest (sometimes blanched and shredded, sometimes grated raw) to be added to a basic Hollandaise were in La Repertoire de la Cuisine 1979, Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking Penguin edition, Michel Gueraud’s Cuisine Gourmande, Art de Culinaire Moderne by Henri-Paul Pelleprat 1937, Andre Simon’s Encyclopedia de Gastronomie 1939 and my old Penguin Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

 There was no mention of Maltaise at all in the Escoffier, Ma Cuisine (1965 English edition), any of my three Boulestins, Connie Spry, Prue Leith or Paul Bocuse’s New Cuisine (in English). I looked in several others too.

I would be really grateful to know what classic books must be missing from my little kitchen library, or is it a little unfair, given the above, to expect chefs (who are given a sparse 15 minutes to make three sauces) to know that they should boil the blood orange juice?