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Good White Sauce
This is made by taking stock or the liquor in which the fish, flesh or fowl has been cooked, a little flour, pepper and salt. Turn in two beaten eggs, and let the whole come to a boil, stirring constantly. Or it may be made with one pint of milk, a small onion, a small head of celery and a little parsley, white pepper and salt, and two ounces of butter. The butter is melted in a saucepan; dredge the flour slowly in until mixed. Previously, the milk, herbs, pepper and salt, must have been cooked together in a " bain marie," or some vessel placed in another of boiling water. Stir the milk slowly in, then the well-whisked egg, stirring all the while. When it simmers it is done.
Two sauces are given here in one paragraph: a quick egg-and-stock liaison, and a proper infused white sauce built on butter and flour. Both hinge on the same thing, and the original text is misleading about it.
- Do not let it boil once the egg is inThe first version says to bring the whole to a boil after adding two beaten eggs; that will scramble them into threads. Hold the sauce just below a simmer, around 175-180F, and pull it off the heat as soon as it thickens and coats the spoon. The second version gets it right with "when it simmers it is done" — that means the first lazy bubbles, not a rolling boil.
- Temper the eggsWhisk a ladle of the hot liquid into the beaten eggs before returning the mixture to the pan. The original omits this step, which is the single most common reason the sauce breaks.
- Unspecified flourNeither version gives a quantity. For the milk-based sauce, about 1 oz of flour (3 to 4 level tablespoons) will thicken a pint to a pourable consistency; more if you want it thick enough to mask. For the stock version, a tablespoon of flour slaked in cold stock is enough given the eggs are also thickening.
- "Bain marie"A bowl or pan set in a larger pan of simmering water — a double boiler. Here it is used only to infuse the milk gently with the onion, celery and parsley without scorching it; twenty minutes off the boil is plenty.
- Strain the infusionThe recipe never says to remove the vegetables, but the point of the infusion is flavour, not texture. Strain the milk before adding it to the roux, and press the solids to get the liquid out.
- Dredging the flour"Dredge the flour slowly in until mixed" means sift or shake it over the melted butter while stirring. Cook the resulting paste a minute or two over low heat to lose the raw-flour taste, but do not let it colour — this is a white sauce.
- White pepper is deliberateBlack pepper works identically but leaves visible specks in a sauce whose whole appeal is its paleness. This was a matter of appearance in period cooking, and still is.
- YieldThe milk version makes about a pint, enough to sauce fish or poultry for four to six. It thickens further as it cools; loosen with a little milk rather than reheating hard.
White sauce of this kind is a workhorse of Anglo-American cooking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, sitting somewhere between the French sauce béchamel and sauce allemande — the latter being a velouté finished with egg yolks, which the first version here loosely resembles, though it uses whole beaten eggs and plain cooking liquor rather than a made velouté. That a household book offers both a thrifty version made from whatever liquor the fish or fowl was boiled in and a more careful one built on infused milk tells you a good deal about how such books were used: the same page had to serve the cook with a stockpot going and the cook with nothing but a pint of milk. The instruction to use a bain marie rather than direct heat reflects a period when stovetop control meant moving the pan, not turning a dial.