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Drawn Butter
Rub a small cup of butter into half a table-spoon flour, beating it to a cream, adding, if needed, a little salt; pour on it half a pint boiling water, stirring it fast, and taking care not to let it quite boil, as boiling makes it oily and unfit for use. The boiling may be prevented by placing the sauce-pan containing it in a larger one of boiling water, covering and shaking frequently until it reaches the boiling point. A great variety of sauces which are excellent to eat with fish, poultry, or boiled meats, can be made by adding different herbs, such as parsley, mint, or sweet marjoram, to drawn butter. First throw them into boiling water, cut fine, and they are ready to be added, when serve immediately, with two hard-boiled eggs, chopped fine. This makes a nice sauce to serve with baked fish. The chopped inside of a lemon with the seeds out, to which the chicken liver has been added, makes a good sauce for boiled chicken. For anchovy sauce, add two tea-spoons of anchovy extract or paste (kept by all grocers) to a half pint of drawn butter sauce, and stir well. For lobster sauce, chop the meat of the tail and claws of a good-sized lobster into pieces (not too small). Half an hour before dinner, make half a pint of drawn-butter, add the chopped lobster, a pinch of coral, another of cayenne, and a little sålt. When done it should not be a solid mass, but the pieces of lobster should appear distinctly in the thin cream.
An emulsified butter sauce of the pre-roux era: mostly butter, barely thickened with flour, and held below a boil. The hinge is temperature, not technique.
- Never let it boilThe whole sauce hangs on this. Boiling breaks the emulsion and the butter separates out greasy on top. The double-boiler arrangement described is the reliable way to hold it; a heavy pan over low heat with constant stirring also works.
- MeasurementsA "small cup" of butter is unquantified; period cups varied, so read it as somewhere around 6 oz (about 1 1/2 sticks). Half a pint of water is one cup. Half a tablespoon of flour to that much butter is very little thickener by modern standards, which is why the finished sauce should read as a thin cream rather than a gravy.
- "Rub into" and "beat to a cream"The butter is not melted first. Work the flour into softened butter until smooth, then pour the boiling water on while stirring hard, so the flour disperses without lumping.
- HerbsBlanching the parsley, mint or marjoram in boiling water before chopping sets the colour and takes the raw edge off. Add them at the last moment; held in a warm sauce they turn drab.
- Anchovy extractThe recipe allows either extract or paste; bottled anchovy essence is now hard to find, so tubed anchovy paste is the practical choice. The recipe calls for two teaspoons to half a pint, but start lower and taste.
- Lobster coralThe coral is the roe of a female lobster, dark green raw and turning coral-red when cooked. You only get it if your lobster is a female, so treat it as a bonus; the sauce is fine without it.
- Chicken liver sauceThe liver goes in cooked and finely chopped, not raw — poach or sauté it first, since the sauce itself never gets hot enough to cook offal through.
"Drawn butter" is an older English name for a melted-butter sauce, and it was a workhorse of nineteenth-century American cookery: the thing poured over boiled fish, boiled fowl, asparagus and puddings alike. The word "drawn" is usually explained as meaning melted or clarified, as in drawn butter for lobster, though the origin is not settled, and this version is emulsified with water and a token of flour rather than simply melted. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping treats it as a base rather than a single recipe, which is why this one entry carries five sauces inside it — egg, lemon-and-liver, anchovy, lobster and any herb at hand.