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Dip or Gravy for It
Two tablespoons butter, two of flour, rub together and stir in one quart boiling milk, until it thickens a little, put cakes in a tureen and pour gravy over them and add a little salt.
A milk gravy of the plainest kind, meant to be poured over a stack of cakes at supper rather than served as a sauce on the side. The proportions are the thing to notice before you start.
- It is deliberately thinTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to a full quart of milk is somewhere between a quarter and a half of the flour a modern white sauce uses, depending on whether you take a medium or a thin sauce as the standard. The result is a pourable dip that soaks in, not a coating gravy. If you want it to cling, double the butter and flour.
- "Rub together"Work the soft butter and flour into a smooth paste with a fork or fingers, uncooked. This is a beurre manié, not a cooked roux, so the sauce will taste faintly of raw flour unless you keep it at a bare simmer for five minutes after it thickens.
- Adding it to boiling milkDrop the paste in a few small pieces at a time, whisking constantly, and keep the milk just below a hard boil. Dumping the whole lump into a rolling quart is the reliable way to get lumps.
- A quart is four cupsThat is a large batch, enough for six to eight servings of cakes. Halve it for two or three people; the sauce does not reheat gracefully and will need thinning with more milk if it sits.
- "Cakes" hereGiven that this is a savoury milk gravy poured over them, these are griddle cakes, buckwheat cakes, cornmeal cakes or split biscuits, not a sweet layer cake.
- A tureenA deep covered serving dish. Warm it first: a quart of thin milk sauce poured into cold china over cool cakes goes lukewarm almost immediately.
- SeasoningSalt is all the recipe gives, and it needs a decent amount for a quart of milk. Black pepper, or the fat and browned bits from meat fried alongside, are common additions to gravies of this kind, though the recipe does not call for them.
"Dip" was a common American household word for a thin pour-over sauce in the nineteenth century, and it seems to have survived longest in the South and in Pennsylvania and Appalachian kitchens, where milk gravy over biscuits or corn cakes was a standard cheap supper. The ancestry is the English butter-and-flour sauce, but the economy of the thing is plain enough: a quart of milk, two spoons of butter and two of flour would stretch a plate of griddle cakes into a meal for a family.