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Brown Sauce
Melt two ounces of butter in a small sauce-pan, and add one ounce of flour, stirring until it is of a brown colour. Then add sufficient boiling stock to render it of a cream-like consistency, and season to taste with salt and pepper.
This is a brown roux thinned with stock — the base of the classic espagnole family, stripped to its essentials. The whole dish stands or falls on how far you take the roux before the liquid goes in.
- The hinge: brown the roux slowlyTwo ounces of butter to one ounce of flour is a loose, fat-heavy roux that colours fast. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly for 8-12 minutes until it smells nutty and is the colour of an old penny; scorched flour turns the sauce bitter and no amount of stock will rescue it.
- Proportions and yield1 oz flour is roughly 3 to 4 tablespoons, and 2 oz butter is half a US stick. The book gives no stock quantity; a pint of stock would yield about 2 cups of sauce, and it thickens further as it stands.
- "Cream-like consistency"The book gives no stock quantity because the target is visual: the sauce should coat a spoon and run off in a sheet rather than in drops. Add the stock in stages, whisking smooth between additions, and stop when it looks right rather than measuring.
- Boiling stock, not coldThe instruction is deliberate. Hot liquid into hot roux disperses without lumping. Note too that browned flour has less thickening power than white, so a brown sauce stays looser than a white one made with the same flour.
- The stock does the workIn a well-staffed Victorian kitchen a stockpot was often kept going, and for a brown sauce the stock intended is a brown one. A commercial low-sodium beef stock is the nearest modern equivalent; season only at the end, since reduction concentrates the salt.
- Simmer it outThe recipe stops at seasoning, but ten to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer after the stock goes in will cook off any raw-flour taste and let scum and fat rise to be skimmed, which matters with this much butter.
Brown sauce earns its entry for a reason: it is not a dish but a building block, the plain English cousin of the French espagnole, which Carême is generally credited with codifying early in the nineteenth century. A late-Victorian cook was expected to keep a brown roux and a brown sauce to hand and to turn them into a dozen named sauces by additions — mushrooms, wine, capers, sharp herbs — so a dictionary of cookery gives the skeleton once and cross-refers to it thereafter. The very brevity is a period marker: the stock, which is where all the flavour actually lives, needs no explanation.