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Cream or White Sauce No. 1
(For Creaming Vegetables or Macaroni) 1/2 Tablespoonful Snowdrift 1 Tablespoonful Flour 1/3 Teaspoonful Salt Few Grains Pepper 1 Cupful Milk Melt the Snowdrift in a sauce-pan, stir in the flour and seasonings and very gradually add the milk, a little at a time, so that with each addition it will be entirely taken up. Bring to boiling-point, let boil three minutes, or cook over boiling water for ten minutes, when it is ready to use.
A thin white sauce built on shortening rather than butter, sized for pouring over vegetables or macaroni. It works as written; the only real substitutions are the fat and the vessel.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening; this booklet is promotional literature for it. Substitute an equal amount of butter for better flavour, or any neutral solid shortening if you want the original texture.
- This is a thin sauceOne tablespoon of flour per cup of milk is the classic "thin" proportion, and the fat here is only half the flour, so it will coat vegetables lightly and no more. For a sauce that will hold a croquette or a gratin together, double both fat and flour.
- Add the milk gradually, and mean itThe hinge of the whole method. Each splash must be worked smooth into the roux before the next goes in; add it all at once to a flour paste and you get lumps that no amount of boiling will disperse. Warming the milk first makes this easier.
- Three minutes at the boilStarch needs a genuine boil to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power. Stir constantly, as a sauce this thin scorches quickly on direct heat.
- Or cook over boiling water for ten minutesThe double-boiler option, useful when the heat source is uneven or the sauce has to wait. It is far less likely to catch, but the sauce may need a whisk at the end.
- YieldAbout one cup. It scales up without changing the proportions.
- Holding and reheatingA skin forms within a minute or two off the heat; press plastic wrap or buttered paper to the surface if it must stand. Reheat gently with a splash of milk, as the sauce tightens considerably as it cools.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book, like Crisco's contemporaneous pamphlets, exists to prove the new fat could do everything butter and lard did. That commercial purpose shapes the page: the sauce is numbered "No. 1" as the first of a graded thin-to-thick series, and a plain white sauce is the most useful thing a manufacturer could teach, since it underlies creamed vegetables, scalloped dishes, croquettes and the whole architecture of American domestic-science cookery as codified by Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School. The proportions here fat, flour and a cup of liquid, graded thin to thick are close to the cooking-school formulas of the period, though not identical to them, which is the point: the reader is meant to notice that the familiar formula works with the unfamiliar tin.