Brown Sauce
2 tablespoons butter. 1 slice onion. 4 tablespoons flour. 1½ cups Brown Stock. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper.
PROCESS: Melt butter in sauce pan, add onion and cook until delicately browned; remove onion, and cook butter until richly browned, stirring constantly; add flour sifted with seasonings, stir to a paste and continue browning. Then pour on stock, slowly stirring until smooth and glossy. Onion may be omitted.
A classic brown roux sauce — the espagnole of American home cookbooks, built on browned butter, browned flour and beef stock. The whole dish lives or dies on how far you take the browning.
- The hinge: brown the flour, don't scorch itButter and flour must go well past blond — a deep nut brown — or the sauce tastes pasty and looks grey. Keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving; the moment it smells acrid rather than toasty it is finished and must be started again.
- Browned flour thickens lessFour tablespoons of flour to 1½ cups of stock looks heavy on paper, but toasting breaks down starch, so a brown roux has perhaps half the thickening power of a white one. Expect a sauce that naps a spoon, not a paste.
- Brown StockThe capitalisation points to a Brown Stock recipe given elsewhere in the book. A good unsalted beef stock works; if using commercial stock, hold back the ¼ teaspoon salt until the sauce has reduced and tasted.
- Cup measureTurn-of-the-century American recipes use the 8-oz cup, so 1½ cups is 12 fl oz / about 355 ml.
- Adding the liquidThe recipe does not specify the stock's temperature. Cool stock added in a thin stream to the hot roux, whisked as it goes, is one reliable route to a lump-free sauce; simmer a few minutes afterwards to cook out the raw flour taste.
- "Smooth and glossy"Keep the sauce at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil, and strain through a fine sieve if any specks of over-browned flour remain.
- YieldAbout 1½ cups, enough for four to six servings over roast beef, croquettes or braised meats. It reheats well; whisk in a spoonful of stock to loosen after chilling.
Brown sauce is the American household descendant of the French sauce espagnole, the mother sauce generally traced to nineteenth-century codification, stripped of its mirepoix, tomato and long reduction and rebuilt as something a cook could produce in fifteen minutes from a Sunday roast's stock. In an economical kitchen a brown sauce turned yesterday's meat, or a plate of croquettes, into something that read as a dinner course. The instruction to brown the butter before the flour goes in reflects a period when cooks judged a roux entirely by color and smell \— hence the careful vocabulary of "delicately browned" against "richly browned" in a single short paragraph.