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THICKENING, QUICKLY MADE (for immediate use)
When it is wished to thicken sauces, and brown thickening is not at hand, dissolve half an ounce of butter, and then mix smoothly with it a table-spoonful of flour. Stir it quickly over a gentle fire with a wooden spoon for three minutes, moisten gradually with a pint of stock or broth, let it boil three or four minutes, season properly, and it will be ready for use. Sufficient for a pint of sauce.
This is a small blond roux made to order, for cooks who kept a jar of brown thickening on hand but had run out. The proportions give a light, pourable sauce rather than a coating one.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf an ounce of butter is about one tablespoon; a tablespoon of flour is roughly 8 g, though the recipe does not say whether level or heaped. A Victorian pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, so roughly 2 1/2 US cups of stock.
- The ratio is deliberately thinThe ratio is a thin one -- one tablespoon of flour to a pint of liquid gives a lightly thickened, pourable sauce at most. For a sauce that will nap meat or hold a filling, double both butter and flour.
- "Brown thickening"A brown roux, cooked long and slow to a nut colour and kept ready for daily use; the recipe assumes it is normally "at hand". It carried flavour as well as body, and this quick version has neither the colour nor the toasted taste, so a well-made stock matters more here.
- Gentle fire, three minutesMedium-low heat. Three minutes is enough to cook out the raw flour taste without taking on colour. If it starts to smell like toast or turns tan, you are heading for a blond or brown roux, which thickens less.
- Moisten graduallyThis is the hinge. Add the first ladle of stock off the heat and work it smooth before the next, or the flour seizes into lumps that no amount of boiling will break down. A whisk does this faster than the wooden spoon, though the spoon is better for reaching the corners of the pan.
- Warm or cold stockEither works if added slowly. Cold stock into hot roux gives you a little more margin against lumping; hot stock is quicker but wants steadier whisking.
- Boil it properlyThe three to four minutes of boiling matter: flour reaches its full thickening power only near the boil, and a sauce taken off early will be both thinner and raw-tasting.
- Season at the endAs the recipe directs, after the boil, when you can taste whatever salt the stock already carried.
- YieldA pint, as stated; the recipe gives no number of servings.
Roux was assumed knowledge in a well-run Victorian kitchen. A serious household kept prepared thickenings in the larder, stored in a jar and spooned out as needed, exactly as a professional kitchen still keeps roux by the tub. The technique itself is generally traced to seventeenth-century French practice, where flour cooked in fat replaced the older thickeners of bread, ground almonds and egg yolk, and it reached English cookery books thoroughly domesticated. What this entry really records is the difference between a kitchen with a stock pot and a store of prepared bases and one working from hand to mouth: the quick roux is the fallback, and the book says so plainly.