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Gravy, White Roux, for Thickening
Proceed as for GRAVY, BROWN ROUX, FOR THICKENING, but do not keep the flour and butter sufficiently long on the fire to take any colour. This preparation is used for thickening white sauces. Time, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient, a dessert-spoonful of roux will thicken a pint of gravy.
A cross-reference entry rather than a standalone method: it assumes you have already read the brown roux instruction on the facing page. The substance of it is equal parts butter and flour cooked together gently until the raw flour taste is gone but before any colour develops.
- The hinge: no colourKeep the pan over low heat and stir constantly. The moment the mixture starts to smell nutty or take on a straw tint it is no longer a white roux and will tint a béchamel or velouté grey-beige.
- What "a quarter of an hour" meansFifteen minutes is long for a white roux by modern standards; the entry gives only a time, with no indication of the heat intended, though such a time implies a very gentle fire. On a gas or induction hob at the lowest setting, five to eight minutes over gentle heat achieves the same thing; judge by smell and the loss of the pasty raw-flour aroma, not the clock.
- ProportionsRoux is conventionally made to roughly equal weights of butter and flour — say 1 oz (30 g) of each — but the brown roux entry this cross-refers to is not reproduced here, so the proportions Cassell's intended cannot be confirmed from this page.
- A dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon it at about 2 level teaspoons, roughly 10 ml. Note that the pint is Imperial, 20 fl oz or 570 ml.
- That ratio gives a thin sauceTwo teaspoons of roux to an Imperial pint is barely a thickening at all by current practice — it will give a broth-bodied gravy. For a pouring sauce reckon on about 1 oz each of butter and flour per pint; for a coating sauce that will nap a fillet, closer to 1½ oz of each.
- Adding the liquidCool the roux slightly and add hot, not boiling, stock or milk in stages, whisking each addition smooth before the next. Then simmer the finished sauce a good five minutes — the starch grains need heat and time to swell fully, and an undercooked sauce tastes of flour however carefully the roux was made.
- Making it aheadThe yield note — a dessert-spoonful thickens a pint — suggests a quantity made up in advance, though the entry does not say so. White roux will keep a week or two refrigerated in a covered jar and freezes well; a spoonful whisked into simmering liquid saves making it fresh each time.
Roux is a load-bearing technique of nineteenth-century professional cookery. The distinction between brown and white roux, and the sauces built on each, was formalised in French practice — the ordering of the sauce families is often credited to Carême in the early 1800s, though roux itself is considerably older — and British household books absorbed the vocabulary over the following decades, which is why an English dictionary of cookery uses the French word without troubling to translate it. The economy of the entry — a cross-reference, a cost in pence, a yield in dessert-spoonfuls — is characteristic of Cassell's, written for a mistress of the house pricing her kitchen as much as for the cook working in it.