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White Sauce (One-quarter pound butter)
One-quarter pound butter.
One tablespoonful flour.
One-half gill of water.
One-half spoonful vinegar.
A very little nutmeg.
Salt to taste.
Mix flour and water to a smooth paste. Put all in a saucepan; do not let it boil but simmer until it thickens.
Despite the name, this is not a béchamel — there is no milk in it. It is a drawn-butter sauce, a flour-stabilised butter emulsion of the sort English and American cooks served over boiled game and poultry.
- The hinge: never let it boilThe original says it plainly and means it. With a quarter pound of butter to four tablespoons of liquid, this is an emulsion held together by a very small amount of starch. Bring it to a boil and it will break into oiled butter and a puddle of paste.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fl oz — a quarter cup of water. That is the entire liquid content besides the vinegar.
- "One-half spoonful vinegar"Genuinely ambiguous: this recipe writes "tablespoonful" when it means one, which may suggest the unqualified "spoonful" is a teaspoon, but it is not stated. Start with half a teaspoon of a plain white wine or cider vinegar and taste; the acid is there to cut the butter, not to be tasted as vinegar.
- Butter quantityA quarter pound is 4 oz, one standard American stick, 115 g. The proportion of butter to flour is far higher than any modern white sauce — expect something closer to a warm hollandaise in richness.
- Making it hold togetherSlaking the flour in the cold water first, as directed, is what keeps it from lumping, since there is no roux stage. Add the butter in pieces over low heat and swirl rather than beat hard.
- NutmegGrate it fresh from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg was as flat then as it is now, and "a very little" means a few strokes on the fine grater.
- Yield and servingAbout three-quarters of a cup — enough for four modest servings poured over boiled or roast meat or a plain bird. Make it immediately before serving and hold it warm off direct heat; it is unlikely to survive reheating once cooled.
"White sauce" in nineteenth-century English-language cookbooks covered a much wider family than the milk-and-roux béchamel the term now denotes. This version belongs to the older drawn-butter tradition, in which melted butter is bound with a trace of flour and sharpened with a little vinegar or lemon — the same lineage as the "melted butter" sauces that Hannah Glasse and her successors sent to table with fish and boiled fowl, and which foreign visitors regularly mocked as England's one universal sauce. The absence of milk is not an oversight but the point — this is the plainer, older, cheaper way of finishing a dish, requiring nothing a household would not already have.