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Drawn Butter Sauce
1/3 cup butter. 3 tablespoons flour. 1¼ cups boiling water. ½ teaspoon salt. 1/2 cup sugar. 1/4 cup brandy. 1 teaspoon nutmeg.
PROCESS: Divide the butter into two equal parts. Melt one part in a sauce-pan; add flour, and stir to a smooth paste; add boiling water slowly, stirring constantly; let come to boiling point. Remove to side of range, and add remaining butter in small bits; continue beating. Then add salt, sugar, brandy and nutmeg. Beat again, and serve very hot.
This is the sweet version of drawn butter — a flour-thickened butter sauce for steamed and boiled puddings, not a savoury one for fish. Two of the printed quantities need judgement before you start.
- The water measurementThe printed page gives 1¼ cups boiling water, as our text now reads. Start with about 1 cup and thin to the consistency you want.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintA teaspoon and a half of salt in a cup or so of dessert sauce is inedible. Half a teaspoon is the plausible reading. Add a pinch at a time and taste.
- "Drawn butter" does not mean clarifiedIn American books of this period drawn butter is a cooked roux-and-water sauce, sometimes enriched with more butter off the heat. Elsewhere the phrase is used more loosely, sometimes for little more than melted butter served with fish or shellfish.
- Side of the rangeA coal range had a cooler zone at the edge of the top plate. Read it as the lowest burner setting, or off the heat altogether. The second half of the butter must go in below a simmer or the sauce breaks.
- Beating in the butterAdd it a few small cold pieces at a time, whisking each in before the next. This is the hinge of the recipe: it emulsifies the butter into the starch-bound base and gives the glossy body the sauce is meant to have.
- Brandy goes in last, off the heatIt is there for flavour and is not cooked off. Anyone avoiding alcohol should leave it out and add a little more nutmeg and a splash of cream instead.
- NutmegA full teaspoon is a lot unless it is freshly grated, in which case it is assertive but correct for the period. Pre-ground jarred nutmeg tastes flatter and duller; start with half.
- Yield and servingAround 2 cups, enough for six to eight. Serve it very hot, spooned over plum pudding, cottage pudding, apple dumplings or steamed fruit pudding; it thickens and dulls as it cools.
Sweet drawn butter belongs to a family of pudding sauces — foamy sauce, brandy sauce, and the cold creamed hard sauce — that American cookbooks kept in constant rotation through the nineteenth century, because the puddings they accompanied were dense, steamed and dry by design. The flour-thickened base was the economical option: it stretched a third of a cup of butter across eight servings where a hard sauce would have wanted twice as much. The book belongs to the era of the household cookery school, when recipes were written as fixed measures and a numbered "process" rather than as a paragraph of narrative — a style generally traced to Boston teaching kitchens of the 1880s and 1890s, and one reason a single mis-set fraction, as here, can leave a recipe unmakeable as printed.