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Sauce for Boiled Meats
-Drawn butter, with chopped parsley and sliced carrots, and pickled cucumbers. Boil carrots for a dish to eat with the lamb, etc. Slice into it some potatoes, parsley and onions, and with a little thickening, you have a good soup.
Two ideas are compressed into one paragraph here: a butter sauce for boiled lamb or beef, and a way of turning the carrot cooking water into soup the next day. Neither is given in quantities, so treat the entry as a method rather than a formula.
- Drawn butter is the baseIn American books of this period "drawn butter" is not clarified butter but a thin butter sauce: about 2 tablespoons flour cooked briefly in 2 tablespoons butter, whisked with a cup of hot water or the meat's cooking liquid, then finished with another 2 tablespoons butter off the heat. It breaks if boiled hard after the finishing butter goes in.
- Use the meat liquor, not plain waterUse the meat liquor rather than plain water -- Boiled lamb or beef leaves a well-flavoured broth, and the sauce can be made with a cup of it skimmed of fat, though the entry does not specify the liquid.
- The carrots are cooked separatelyThe sliced carrots go into the sauce already boiled and tender; raw carrot will not soften in a few minutes of butter sauce. Boil them in salted water until just yielding, then drain and reserve the water.
- Pickled cucumbersRead this as sour dill pickles or cornichons, finely chopped and stirred in at the end. Sweet bread-and-butter pickles will throw the sauce off balance.
- Add the parsley lastA generous handful of chopped flat-leaf or curly parsley, off the heat, keeps its colour. Held in a simmering sauce it turns drab in a few minutes.
- "A little thickening"For the soup this means a flour-and-water or flour-and-butter thickening, roughly a tablespoon of flour per pint of liquid, simmered a few minutes to lose the raw taste.
- The soup is a second mealThe carrot water plus sliced potato, onion and parsley makes a thin vegetable soup; give the potatoes 15 to 20 minutes at a simmer. Season firmly, as the vegetable water alone is bland.
- YieldNo quantities are given. As a rough guide, a cup of drawn butter sauce would dress meat for four to six, and the soup as described might serve two to three.
Drawn butter was a workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century English and American kitchens, the plain cook's rough counterpart to a French velouté, and it appears in some form in many household manuals from the eighteenth century onward. Variants were built by dropping something into the base: parsley sauce for boiled fowl, egg sauce for salt fish, caper sauce for mutton, and here a chopped-pickle version whose sharpness cuts the fat of boiled lamb much as a caper sauce would. The tail of the entry, turning the carrot cooking water into soup, is characteristic of the compilations of this period, where economy and instruction sit in the same sentence and nothing that has taken on flavour is poured away.