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Butter, Melted
Mix half an ounce of flour smoothly with an ounce of butter melted in a saucepan. Add a little salt and half a pint of cold water. Stir the sauce, let it boil for three minutes, and it is ready. For a detailed description of the best way of making good melted butter, see PRINCIPLES OF COOKERY.
"Melted butter" in a Victorian English book is not clarified butter but a plain flour-thickened butter sauce — the ancestor of béchamel made with water instead of milk. The whole point is a smooth, glossy sauce, and everything hinges on how the flour goes in.
- The hinge: mix the flour coldMix the flour into the fat first -- The instruction to mix the flour "smoothly" with the butter before any liquid is the key step. Work the flour into the melted butter until it is a uniform paste, then add the cold water gradually, stirring, or you risk lumps that boiling will not disperse.
- Imperial measuresHalf an ounce of flour is about 2 level tablespoons; an ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons or a quarter stick. Half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, or 1 1/4 US cups — noticeably more than a US half pint, so the sauce is meant to be pourable rather than thick.
- Boil it, but only brieflyThree minutes at a bare boil, stirred constantly, is enough to cook out the raw flour taste and let the starch swell fully. Longer over direct heat and the sauce catches on the bottom of the pan; a heavy-based saucepan helps.
- Water, not milkThis sauce was poured over boiled fish, vegetables and puddings. Substituting milk gives you a béchamel, which is a different sauce with a different purpose.
- FinishingA knob of cold butter beaten in at the end, off the heat, adds gloss. That step is not in this version.
- YieldAbout 1 1/4 cups, enough to sauce four servings of fish or boiled vegetables. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water.
"Melted butter" was a mainstay sauce of the English kitchen through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it had a reputation to match — the often-repeated jibe that England had sixty religions and only one sauce is usually attributed to the Neapolitan diplomat Domenico Caracciolo (sometimes to Voltaire), and the single sauce is traditionally taken to be this one. It underpinned a whole family of variations: add chopped parsley for parsley sauce, capers for caper sauce with mutton, anchovy essence for fish, or eggs for egg sauce. The cross-reference to PRINCIPLES OF COOKERY at the end suggests the sauce was thought basic enough to state in three lines yet important enough to treat again at length. The convention of calling a flour-thickened sauce "melted butter" was a source of confusion, and during the twentieth century the term gave way to "butter sauce" or to milk-based white sauces.