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Cream or White Sauce No. 2
(For use in Creaming Meats, Eggs, Noodles and Fish, and in Making Escallops) ⅛ Tablespoonful Snowdrift Follow directions as given in the pre- 2 Tablespoonfuls Flour 1 Cupful Milk ½ Teaspoonful Salt ceding recipe. 1 Teaspoonful Pepper
A basic white sauce built on shortening rather than butter, thickened enough for creamed dishes and scallops. The proportions are sound; the seasoning as printed is not.
- SnowdriftSnowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening, sold as a cheaper, longer-keeping stand-in for butter or lard. Any neutral solid shortening works, and butter can be used at the same measure.
- The seasoning is out of proportionThe seasoning looks wrong as printed -- One and a half teaspoons of salt and a full teaspoon of pepper for a single cup of milk would be inedible, and the amounts are more likely a misprint than the intended quantities. Season to taste rather than following the printed figures.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of fat to two of flour to one cup of milk gives a medium sauce that coats a spoon and holds creamed meat or fish together. For a pouring sauce, use half again as much milk; for a binder in croquettes, double the flour and fat.
- The missing methodThe referenced preceding recipe is not reproduced here; the usual procedure is to melt the fat, stir in the flour and cook the paste a minute or two without colouring it, then add the milk gradually off the heat, return to the heat and stir until it thickens and boils. The flour must cook before the milk goes in or the sauce tastes raw.
- LumpsWith only one tablespoon of fat to two of flour the roux is dry and crumbly rather than smooth, so it takes the milk less readily. Add the milk in small amounts at first, working each addition smooth before the next.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to cream roughly two cups of diced meat, fish, eggs or noodles, or to sauce four servings of scalloped vegetables.
Cookbooks issued by shortening and oil manufacturers were a standard promotional form in the early twentieth century, and Snowdrift, a cottonseed product of the Southern cotton-oil trade generally described as hydrogenated, was among the brands that pressed hardest for a place in the household kitchen. The strategy is visible in this entry: white sauce is the most-used preparation in the American repertoire of the day, the foundation of every creamed and scalloped dish on the family table, so demonstrating that the brand could stand in for butter in it was worth more than any showpiece recipe. The sauce itself descends from the French bechamel by way of nineteenth-century English and American domestic cookery, where it was simplified into a plain flour-and-milk binder and taught as a numbered series of graded thicknesses, exactly as the numbering here implies.