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Thick White Sauce No. 3
(For use in Binding together Croquettes, Fish, Meat Loaves, etc. 2 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 4 Tablespoonfuls Flour 1 Cupful Milk ⅔ Teaspoonful Salt ⅛ Teaspoonful Pepper Follow the directions for making Cream or White Sauce No. 1.
A panade-style binding sauce: twice the flour of a pouring white sauce, so it sets stiff when cold and holds chopped meat or fish together for shaping and frying. The recipe leans on White Sauce No. 1 for method, which is simply melt the fat, stir in the flour, cook briefly, then add the milk gradually and cook until thick.
- SnowdriftA brand of hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold from the early twentieth century. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter gives better flavour and behaves the same way here.
- Proportions2 tablespoons fat to 4 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk is roughly double the flour of a standard white sauce. Do not reduce the flour if you want the mixture to hold a croquette shape.
- Seasoning amountsThe fractions have dropped out of the printed text: '23' and '18' are most likely two-thirds of a teaspoon of salt and an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper. Season to taste, and remember the filling gets salted too.
- The hingeCook the flour in the fat a full minute or two before the milk goes in, and add the milk in stages while whisking. Undercooked flour tastes pasty, and a lumpy binder cannot be smoothed out later.
- Chill before shapingThe sauce must be thoroughly cold, ideally several hours in the refrigerator, before you mix it with the chopped filling and form croquettes. Warm binder slumps and the croquettes burst in the fat.
- YieldAbout one cup of stiff sauce, enough to bind roughly two cups of finely chopped cooked meat, fish or vegetables, or twelve to sixteen small croquettes.
Cookbooks issued by shortening and flour companies were a standard piece of American food advertising in the first decades of the twentieth century, and Snowdrift was one of the best known cottonseed-oil shortenings, promoted heavily as a cheaper substitute for butter and lard. A numbered series of white sauces, thin for soups, medium for creamed dishes, thick for binding, was the backbone of the domestic-science curriculum then taught in schools and normal colleges, and its appearance in a brand booklet shows how quickly that classroom system became the ordinary language of the home kitchen. Croquettes in particular depended on it: the thick sauce cooled to a paste was what let a cook turn yesterday's roast or a little leftover fish into a dish worth serving.