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Roux, White
Proceed as above, but be careful to remove the paste from the fire before it has acquired any colour. White roux is used for white sauces.
A two-line entry that assumes you have just read the brown roux above it: butter melted, flour stirred in, cooked gently. The whole point here is what you don't let happen.
- The hinge: no colour at allWhite roux must stay pale ivory. The moment it takes on even a straw tint it becomes a blond roux and will tinge a béchamel or velouté grey-beige. Use a heavy pan over low heat and pull it off early rather than late.
- ProportionsThe standard is equal weights of butter and flour — roughly 1 oz (30 g) of each will thicken 1/2 pint (about 300 ml) of milk or stock to a coating consistency. Cassell's leaves this to the earlier entry, so measure by weight rather than by spoon.
- Cook it, but brieflyTwo to three minutes of gentle bubbling is generally enough to lose the raw-flour taste. White roux is cooked less than brown, and the less a roux is browned the more thickening power it retains.
- Adding the liquidCooks commonly advise a temperature difference between roux and liquid — hot liquid into cooled roux, or cold liquid into hot roux — on the grounds that hot into hot lumps more readily. Whichever way, add in stages, beating well before each addition.
- FatThe entry does not say which butter; unsalted is the safer choice, as salted butter and modern spreads with high water content will spit and throw off the ratio. Clarified butter browns less readily if you find the paste colouring too fast.
- KeepingRoux holds well. Made in quantity, cooled and refrigerated, it keeps about a week and can be broken off in lumps and whisked into simmering liquid.
Roux is simply the French for a reddish-brown colour, borrowed into cookery for the flour-and-butter paste and then, illogically, extended to the white version that is defined by having no colour at all. Flour-thickened liaisons appear in French cookery writing from the seventeenth century onward and the technique is generally traced to that tradition; by the nineteenth century the classification of roux by degree of cooking — white, blond, brown — was standard in professional French kitchens and passed wholesale into English books. It is not a dish but a piece of grammar, learned once and then referred back to from every white sauce, soup and made-dish in the volume.