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Fast-Day Sauce
Use fish broth for this. Blend three table-spoonfuls of flour with four ounces of good butter, put it into a stewpan with about a pint and a half of the broth, and heat it till it thickens, but it should not boil. Boil in some more broth an onion sliced, a head of celery, a carrot, and some parsley, and when tender pour in the butter and stew all together. Any additional flavouring may be added, and, if liked, a little lemon-juice or vinegar-this last should be white. Strain for use. If a brown sauce be required, the flour and butter should be browned before the broth is added, and the vegetables fried brown in butter. Time, about fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 6d.
A meatless velouté built on fish stock, given in the terse reference style of Cassell's. The proportions are workable but the method assumes you already know how a roux behaves.
- The hinge: do not let it boilThe instruction not to boil governs the first stage. A mixture this rich in butter needs steady heat and constant whisking; a hard boil risks splitting the butter out, and lumps form wherever the flour has not been dispersed. Bring it to a bare shiver, whisking, until it coats the spoon.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half imperial is 30 fl oz, about 850 ml or roughly 3 1/2 US cups. Four ounces of butter is one US stick. The three tablespoons of flour is roughly 1 oz, so this is a very butter-rich sauce by modern standards -- nearer a butter sauce thickened with flour than a classic equal-weight roux.
- Fish brothFish stock here means bones and trimmings of white fish simmered 20-30 minutes, no longer, or it turns bitter and gluey. Bottled clam juice or a good fish fumet works; a shellfish stock will make it sweeter and pinker than intended.
- StewpanA stewpan is a straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any heavy-based saucepan does; avoid unlined aluminium, which will grey the sauce once the lemon juice or vinegar goes in.
- The vegetables are cooked apartRead the sequence carefully: the aromatics are simmered in a second quantity of broth, and the thickened butter mixture is poured into them at the end. That is why the finished sauce is strained " the vegetables are flavouring only and are discarded.
- "White" vinegarThe recipe asks only that the vinegar be white, presumably so as not to tint the sauce; a pale wine or cider vinegar would fit. Modern distilled white vinegar is harsher; white wine vinegar or lemon juice is closer to the intent. Add it off the heat, a teaspoon at a time.
- The brown versionFor the brown sauce, cook the flour and butter to a nut-brown roux and colour the vegetables in butter first. Both stages want patience over medium heat; scorched flour tastes acrid and cannot be corrected.
- YieldSomewhere over a quart, depending on how much broth the vegetables are boiled in, which the recipe leaves unspecified. It reheats gently but will thicken as it stands -- loosen with a little more broth rather than water.
Fast-day cookery is one of the quiet organising principles of nineteenth-century English kitchens, and this sauce exists because meat gravy was off the table. Fridays, the vigils of certain feasts, and the whole of Lent required abstinence from flesh meat in Roman Catholic households, and were also marked out by Anglican fast tables, though those were widely unobserved; cookery books of the period routinely supplied parallel versions of standard preparations " here a velout he ususual veal or beef stock. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s and later revised and reissued as the New Dictionary of Cookery, was an alphabetical reference rather than a narrative cookbook, which explains the compressed telegraphic prose and the inclusion of a probable cost: sixpence, quoted so that a housekeeper could budget the dish against the week's allowance. The brown variant appended at the end is characteristic of the genre, one entry doing the work of two.