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Butter Sauce
Season a cupful of flour with salt, pepper, nutmeg, and cloves. Mix it with some water into a paste, and work in a piece of butter about the size of an egg. Put the thin paste into a pan over the fire, and boil it for a quarter of an hour, then take it off, and add some fresh butter in small portions at a time, continually stirring the contents to prevent the butter from rising to the surface. Afterwards add some vinegar and mix thoroughly. This sauce is used with fish and boiled vegetables. (See also MELTED BUTTER.)
A flour-and-water liaison finished with butter and sharpened with vinegar — closer to a French sauce bâtarde than to the milk-based white sauces most cooks reach for now. The proportions in the original are loose, and one of them needs scaling before anything else.
- The flour quantity is the problemA full cupful of flour (about 4 1/2 oz) will set into wallpaper paste unless it is let down with a great deal of liquid — on the order of a quart. For a sauce for four, work from 2 tablespoons of flour to a cup of water and scale the butter and seasoning accordingly.
- Butter the size of an eggA common Victorian shorthand for roughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The "fresh butter" added at the end is a second, separate quantity, but the recipe gives no amount for it; 2 to 4 oz, cut cold into small cubes, suits the scaled quantities above.
- Mix the paste coldSlake the flour with cold water to a smooth, lump-free cream before it goes near heat. Whisking dry flour into hot liquid is what produces the lumps this method is designed to avoid.
- A quarter of an hour of boilingNot an error. Raw flour tastes chalky, and fifteen minutes at a bare simmer cooks it out and lets the starch swell fully. Stir often and use a heavy pan; a thin one will scorch the bottom.
- The hinge: mount the butter off the heatTake the pan from the fire before the cold butter goes in, a few pieces at a time, whisking constantly. This is the step the original is warning about when it says to keep the butter from rising to the surface — if the sauce gets back above a simmer, the emulsion breaks and you are left with greasy starch water.
- Spices, sparinglyNutmeg and cloves here are a survival of older, heavily spiced sauce-making. Use a scrape of nutmeg and no more than a pinch of ground clove for the quantity above; clove overwhelms fish very quickly.
- VinegarNo amount is given. Start with a teaspoon of white wine or cider vinegar, off the heat, and taste — it should read as brightness, not sourness. Lemon juice is a reasonable substitute with fish.
- Yield and holdingThe scaled-down version gives about a cup and a half, enough for four servings of poached fish or boiled greens. Serve at once, or hold in a bowl over warm — not simmering — water; it will not survive reheating.
Butter sauces of this kind sit between two traditions. The thickening is a cold flour-and-water slurry rather than a cooked roux, a technique that predates the classical French repertoire and remained common in English kitchens through the nineteenth century, while the finish of cold butter whisked in off the heat is the enrichment the French call monter au beurre. The nutmeg and cloves are the more revealing detail: spicing a plain butter sauce for fish looks back to medieval and early modern cookery, when sweet spices were routinely used in savoury sauces, a habit that was in decline by the later nineteenth century. The cross-reference to "Melted Butter" points to the simpler and far more common English version — flour, butter and water, no vinegar, no spice — which foreign commentators often singled out as the characteristic English sauce.