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White Roux
Dissolve a pound of fresh butter in a saucepan over a slow fire; skim it thoroughly, and pour the pure oily part into a clean saucepan, leaving behind the thick curd at the bottom. Mix into it very gradually one pound of well-dried flour, and stir it over a very gentle fire till it is thoroughly baked but not at all browned. The slower it is done the better but care must be taken that it does not acquire the least colour. Put it into a small jar for use; it will keep for some time. Sufficient, a tea-spoonful will thicken half a pint of gravy.
This is a keeping roux — a batch made in bulk and stored, then spooned into sauces as needed. The whole point is colour: white roux must cook long enough to lose its raw taste without taking on the faintest tint.
- The hinge: gentle heat, no colourKeep the pan on the lowest flame and stir more or less constantly; the recipe's own rule is that the slower it is done the better. If the mixture begins to smell nutty or shows the first cream-to-tan shift, it has become a blond roux and will tint every white sauce made from it.
- Clarifying the butterMelting, skimming and pouring off the clear fat leaves behind the milk solids that would scorch and speckle the roux. Modern ghee or shop-bought clarified butter does the same job; a pound of butter yields roughly 12 oz of usable fat, so weigh the flour to match the fat you actually get rather than to the original pound.
- "Well-dried flour"Flour was often damp from storage; drying meant spreading it in a tin in a slow oven and sieving it before use. Present-day bagged flour needs none of this.
- Scale it downA pound of each makes a large batch of roux — enough, at the stated rate, for several gallons of gravy. Four ounces of clarified butter to four ounces of flour is a more realistic household batch.
- The thickening rateA teaspoon to half a pint (10 fl oz in imperial measure) is a light gravy consistency. For a coating sauce reckon considerably more roux per cup of liquid, and let it simmer a few minutes so the starch swells fully.
- Storage"It will keep for some time" meant a cool larder and a covered jar. Refrigerate it; it sets firm and can be spooned off as needed, and it freezes well for months. Discard it if the butter smells at all rancid.
- Using itCold roux whisked into hot liquid is the smoothest route — add it in small pieces off the boil, then bring back to a simmer to activate the starch.
Roux is simply the French for "russet" or "reddish-brown", a name that fits the browned version and survives, illogically, for the white one. The formal division of roux into white, blond and brown belongs to the professional French kitchen, though its origins are older and less tidy than is often supposed: roux blanc and roux brun are already distinguished in eighteenth-century French cookery writing. By the time Cassell's was compiled in late-Victorian London, the scheme had been thoroughly absorbed into English cookery writing. The instruction to make a pound at a time and store it in a jar reflects a kitchen that thickened everything from béchamel to made-up gravies from the same crock, and having the flour already cooked out saved both fuel and the pasty taste of an under-cooked thickening. Its placement in "The Principles of Cookery" rather than among the sauces appears to be deliberate — this seems to have been treated as groundwork, learned once and drawn on daily.