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Melted Butter Sauce
Rub two tea-spoonfuls of flour in four ounces of butter until perfectly smooth in a saucepan, put it on the fire, add very slowly half a pint of milk until all is nicely blended. Allow it to come to the boil; add pepper and salt to taste, and serve. Probable cost, 8d.
A very rich, loose butter sauce thickened with only a token amount of flour. Treat the ratio as deliberate rather than a misprint, and it behaves well.
- The hinge: add the milk slowlyWith this little flour there is not much starch holding the emulsion together, so pouring the milk in fast will split the sauce into greasy butter and thin milk. Add a spoonful at a time, whisking each addition smooth before the next, and keep the pan at a bare simmer.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. With 4 oz (115 g) of butter that gives roughly 400 ml of sauce.
- The butter-to-flour ratioTwo teaspoons of flour to four ounces of butter is a small fraction of the flour a modern white sauce uses for the same quantity of milk. The result is pourable and glossy rather than coating, closer to a beurre blanc in texture than to a bechamel.
- Rub, do not brownWorking the flour into cold or softened butter off the heat is close to the kneaded-butter (beurre manie) approach. The pan should never take colour; if the butter starts to foam and darken before the milk goes in, the sauce will taste nutty rather than clean.
- Bring to the boil, brieflyOne short boil is enough to cook out the raw flour and set what thickening there is. Prolonged boiling drives the emulsion apart and leaves a slick of oil on the surface.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is usually preferred in a white sauce so it stays unspeckled, though the recipe says only pepper. A squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chopped parsley or capers turns it into a common accompaniment for boiled fish.
- If it splitsTake the pan off the heat and whisk in a tablespoon of cold milk or a small piece of cold butter. It will usually come back together.
- Probable cost, 8dEightpence reflects the four ounces of butter, which was the expensive item here. Water-based versions of the same sauce would have cost less.
"Melted butter" was for two centuries the default English sauce, ladled over fish, boiled fowl, greens and puddings alike, and it hovers behind the famous quip -- variously attributed to Caraccioli, Voltaire, Talleyrand and others -- that England had many religions and two sauces. In its plainest form it was butter thickened with flour and water; the milk version here, from Cassell's, is the genteel household variant, richer and less liable to taste of paste. It was a foundation a cook had to master before anything else, the base to which parsley, capers, anchovy, eggs or shrimp were added to produce the rest of the English sauce repertoire. Its decline through the twentieth century tracked the rise of the French-derived bechamel, which uses more flour, less butter, and forgives a heavier hand with the milk jug.