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Drawn-Butter Sauce
To one-half cup of butter, add a very little flour (not a large spoon quite full), with two or three tablespoonfuls of boiling water. Shake the saucepan continually over the fire; allow it to simmer, but not boil, until it thickens.
This is the thinnest and richest of the drawn-butter family: essentially an emulsified butter sauce with just enough flour to hold it together. It behaves like a beurre monté rather than a white sauce, and it depends entirely on temperature control.
- What "drawn butter" meansIn American cookbooks of this period, drawn butter is melted butter thickened with a little flour and water, served with fish, boiled vegetables and puddings. It is not clarified butter, which British books sometimes call by the same name.
- The hinge: simmer, never boilWith half a cup of butter to only two or three tablespoons of water, the emulsion is fragile. A boil will break it and leave you with oily butter and a gritty flour sediment. Keep the pan at the barest tremble and lift it off the heat whenever it threatens.
- Keep shakingThe continual shaking is not fussiness. It is what keeps the water dispersed through the fat, the same mechanical action used in a modern butter emulsion. A whisk works as well and is easier to control.
- The flour quantity"A very little flour (not a large spoon quite full)" is genuinely imprecise; read it as somewhat under a tablespoon. It is worth working the flour into a little of the butter first so it goes in smooth rather than in lumps.
- Boiling water mattersCold water dropped into hot butter is much more likely to separate the sauce, which is presumably why the original specifies boiling water. Have it at a full boil when it goes in; adding it in stages rather than all at once makes it easier to control.
- SeasoningThe original specifies no seasoning at all. If your butter is unsalted you will want salt. Some period cookbooks give lemon juice or chopped parsley as variations on drawn butter for fish, added off the heat.
- Yield and servingA bit over half a cup of finished sauce, enough for two to four servings of boiled fish, asparagus or cauliflower. Serve it at once; it will not hold and cannot be reheated over direct heat without breaking.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking, the thing poured over boiled fish, asparagus, artichokes and steamed puddings in households that had no time for a stock-based sauce. It was often said to serve in place of richer sauces, and cookbooks of the era not infrequently noted how badly it was usually made: greasy, pasty, or boiled to separation. Most published versions use considerably more water than this one and produce something closer to a thin white sauce, so the recipe here, with its half cup of butter to a few spoonfuls of water, is at the rich end of the range and closer to what a French kitchen would recognise as a butter emulsion. The insistence on shaking the pan and on simmering rather than boiling recurs in some printed versions, though others direct the cook to stir, or to let the sauce boil up briefly.