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Cream Sauce (Tablespoons Cottolene)
2 tablespoons Cottolene. 2½ tablespoons flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 1¼ cups hot milk or thin cream.
PROCESS: Melt Cottolene in a sauce pan, add flour, salt and pepper, stir to a smooth paste and pour on slowly hot milk or cream, stirring constantly. Beat with a wire whip until smooth and glossy.
A standard white sauce, printed here in the promotional idiom of a shortening manufacturer. The proportions are sound once you sort out one garbled measurement.
- CottoleneA branded shortening of refined cottonseed oil stiffened with beef suet, sold in the United States from the later nineteenth century and long gone from shelves. Butter is the obvious substitute at the same volume, or a neutral vegetable shortening if you want the flat, fat-only flavour the original had.
- The milk quantity"1/4 cups hot milk" is a printing error. Two tablespoons of fat and two and a half of flour will thicken about a cup to a cup and a quarter of liquid into a medium sauce; a quarter cup alone would give you a stiff paste, not a sauce.
- Cook the rouxThe instruction says only to stir fat and flour to a smooth paste, but give it a minute or two over moderate heat before the milk goes in. Raw flour is the main defect in old white sauces.
- Hot milk, added slowlyHeating the milk first is not decoration. It keeps the roux from seizing and lets the sauce come together in a couple of minutes rather than ten, with less chance of lumps.
- Glossy is the doneness cueThe recipe gives no time. Work off the appearance instead: the sauce thickens, loses its chalky look and turns glossy, at which point it has cooked out. That is roughly three to five minutes at a bare simmer.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for a cup of sauce is on the assertive side by modern habit if the sauce is going over an already salted dish. Season at the end instead, once it has reduced slightly.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, enough to sauce vegetables or creamed meat for four.
Cottolene was one of the first industrial shortenings marketed directly to American home cooks, and 52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a whole genre of cookbooks published by manufacturers to teach housewives to use a new product in place of butter and lard. That is why a plain cream sauce is titled after a fat: the book's business was to prove the shortening could do everything the old fats did. The sauce itself is a standard white sauce of the sort generally traced to French practice and taught in American cooking schools in the decades around 1900 as the foundation on which creamed dishes, croquette mixtures and scalloped vegetables were built. Cottonseed oil, the base of the product, was a by-product of the Southern cotton crop that was long treated as near-worthless, or used for soap and lamp oil, until refining methods in the later nineteenth century made it palatable.