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Blanche Sauce
Cook together one and a half ounces of flour and two ounces of butter, without browning; moisten with a pint of milk and half a pint of white stock. Put in a small onion, a clove, ten peppercorns, and a bay-leaf; stir until it boils, and let it simmer for fifteen minutes. Strain, and use as required.
A béchamel built on a white roux, infused with aromatics and thinned with stock. The whole thing hangs on cooking the flour and butter without letting them colour.
- Keep the roux whiteTwo ounces butter to one and a half ounces flour is a slightly fat-heavy roux, which helps it stay pale. Cook it over low heat for two or three minutes, only until it smells faintly of biscuit and loses its raw floury taste — any colour at all and the finished sauce will not be white, which is the whole point of the name.
- Measures1½ oz flour is about 1/3 cup; 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons. A British pint here is 20 fl oz, so use 2½ cups milk and 1¼ cups stock; American 16-oz pints will give a noticeably thicker sauce, which is not a fault if that is what you want.
- White stockUnroasted veal or chicken stock, made from pale bones and no browned vegetables. A light, unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will tint the sauce.
- Add the liquid warm and in stagesCold liquid dumped in at once is the usual cause of lumps. Warm the milk and stock together and whisk in a third at a time, letting each addition come smooth before the next.
- The fifteen-minute simmer is not optionalIt is there to cook out the starch and to draw flavour from the onion, clove, peppercorns and bay. Keep it at a bare tremble and stir the base of the pan often, since a thickened sauce scorches readily.
- StrainingPass it through a fine sieve rather than a colander — you are removing the aromatics and any residual lumps in one pass. Whole peppercorns and a whole clove are used precisely so they can be caught here; do not substitute ground spice.
- Seasoning and yieldThe original gives no salt, on the assumption the stock and the finished dish carry it; taste and season after straining. The pint of milk and half-pint of stock come to about thirty fluid ounces before the simmer, so expect somewhat under a quart of medium-bodied sauce.
- Holding itIf it must wait, press buttered paper or plastic directly onto the surface, or float a film of melted butter, or it will skin over. It reheats gently with a splash of milk.
Blanche is simply the French for white, and this is a workhorse white sauce of the nineteenth-century kitchen: a roux slackened with milk and pale stock, infused with the standard quartet of onion, clove, peppercorn and bay. The insistence on white stock reflects a period distinction that has largely fallen out of home cooking: stocks were classed as white or brown according to whether the bones and vegetables were roasted first, and using the wrong one was considered a real error, since the colour of a finished dish was judged as closely as its flavour. The technique is generally traced to the codified French sauce system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of which béchamel is the best-known survivor.