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Drawn Butter (Sour Sauce)
Melt two tablespoons butter in a sauce-pan; add three tablespoons flour, stir to a smooth paste and add gradually, while stirring constantly, one cup boiling water. Boil two minutes, then add four tablespoons hot cream and four tablespoons vinegar (if vinegar is too acid use two tablespoons each of vinegar and water), season with salt and pepper.
A white sauce sharpened with vinegar, thin enough to pour over boiled fish or vegetables. It comes together in under ten minutes, and the only real risk is curdling at the end.
- "Drawn butter" is not clarified butterIn American cookbooks of this period drawn butter means a simple flour-thickened butter sauce, not the melted clarified butter served with lobster today. Expect something closer to a thin bechamel made with water.
- The flour-to-butter ratioThree tablespoons flour to two of butter is flour-heavy, which gives body without richness. The recipe says only to stir to a smooth paste before adding liquid; cooking it briefly first will help avoid a raw-flour taste.
- Add the water graduallyBoiling water hitting a hot roux all at once will seize into lumps. Pour in a thin stream, whisking, until the cup of water is smoothly incorporated.
- Vinegar goes in last, off high heatAdd the cream first, then the vinegar, and keep the pan below a boil once the acid is in. Boiling the sauce after the vinegar goes in encourages the cream to break.
- Which vinegarHousehold vinegar of the period varied widely in strength; modern distilled white vinegar is usually around 5 percent acidity and is fairly harsh here. Cider vinegar or a white wine vinegar gives a rounder result, and the recipe's own suggestion of cutting it half-and-half with water is sound.
- CreamThe recipe calls simply for 'hot cream', warmed so it does not chill the sauce; period cream might be thin or thick. Warming it also reduces the chance of curdling when the vinegar follows.
- Yield and servingThe liquid adds up to roughly a cup and a half, enough for about four. The recipe itself names no dish; a sauce of this kind was typically served with boiled or baked fish, boiled fowl, or plain vegetables.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of the nineteenth-century English and American kitchen: flour, butter, water, and whatever seasoning the dish called for. It appears in cookbooks in dozens of variations — egg sauce, caper sauce, parsley sauce, and this sour or acid version — all built on the same base, which is why so many books print the plain sauce once and then list the additions. The sour variant does the work that a hollandaise or a beurre blanc would do in a French kitchen, cutting the richness of boiled fish or fat meat, but with vinegar standing in for lemon or wine and flour standing in for egg yolk.