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Cream Sauce (Melt three tablespoons butter)
Melt three tablespoons butter in a sauce-pan; add three tablespoons flour; stir to a smooth paste. Add one and one-half cups hot thin cream or milk; season with salt and pepper. Reheat onions in sauce; turn in hot serving-dish, and sprinkle with one-half teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
A standard white sauce in the medium-thick proportion, written to finish a dish of boiled onions. Nothing here has changed except the vocabulary.
- The proportionThree tablespoons each of butter and flour to one and a half cups of liquid is a heavy medium sauce, thick enough to coat onions and hold them in a serving dish. For a pouring sauce use two tablespoons of each.
- "Thin cream"This is what would now be sold as light cream, around 18 to 20 percent fat; half-and-half is lighter still. The recipe offers milk as an alternative and whole milk works; heavy cream will make the sauce cloying at this thickness.
- Cook the roux firstThe instruction to "stir to a smooth paste" understates the point. Let the butter and flour bubble together two or three minutes over moderate heat before any liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour.
- Hot liquid, added graduallyThe recipe specifies hot cream for a reason. Add it in three or four stages, whisking each addition smooth before the next, and lumps do not form.
- Finish over low heatOnce all the liquid is in, simmer five minutes or so, stirring, to let the starch swell fully. The sauce thickens noticeably in that time; judge the consistency at the end, not the beginning.
- The onions"Reheat onions in sauce" assumes onions already boiled and drained elsewhere, the sauce being written to finish them. Fold them in gently and warm through only; stirring hard breaks them into layers.
- SeasoningStart with a half teaspoon of salt and correct at the end; flour-thickened sauces mute salt. A scrape of nutmeg is a common addition to white sauces of this kind, though this recipe does not call for it.
- YieldAbout one and a half cups of sauce, enough to dress a dish of onions for a family table.
This is béchamel under a plain American name, and by 1900 it was so thoroughly domesticated that cookbooks printed it without comment as "cream sauce" or "white sauce" and expected every cook to know it by heart. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of 1896 set out the thing by ratio — thin, medium and thick sauce distinguished by tablespoons of butter and flour per cup of liquid — though graded sauce proportions were already in print, in Mrs. Lincoln's book of 1884; that habit of thinking in proportions rather than in whole dishes is exactly what this entry reflects. Creamed onions were a fixture of the American cold-weather table, and it is often said that onions kept all winter in a cellar and that the sauce turned a cheap, plentiful root into something fit for a Sunday dinner; the sprinkle of chopped parsley was the standard period gesture for putting a little color on an otherwise white dish. 52 Sunday Dinners is built as a year of full menus, so a sauce like this appears not as a recipe in its own right but as one component keyed to the boiled onions elsewhere in the book.