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White Sauce, Economical
Beat two ounces of flour and an ounce of butter to a smooth paste in a saucepan over the fire. Add gradually a pint of milk and a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Stir the sauce over the fire for a few minutes, strain through a pointed strainer, and it will be ready for use.
A flour-forward béchamel in which butter has been cut to half the usual weight — the reason for the word "economical." It works, but the ratio and the imperial pint both need noting.
- The ratio is unusualStandard white sauce uses equal weights of flour and butter; here it is 2 oz flour to 1 oz butter. Expect a stiffer, drier roux than usual, and a finished sauce on the thick, coating side rather than a thin pouring sauce.
- The pintCassell's is British, so the pint is 20 fl oz (about 570 ml), not the American 16. With 2 oz flour to 20 fl oz milk you get a thick coating sauce; with a US pint it will be very thick indeed. Add extra milk to loosen if needed.
- Cook the flour, gently"Beat to a smooth paste over the fire" means cook the roux — two or three minutes over low heat, without colouring it, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Too much heat browns it and the sauce is no longer white.
- Milk in stages"Gradually" is doing the work in this recipe. Add a few tablespoons at a time and beat smooth before the next addition; once it is thin and pourable the rest can go in at once.
- A few minutes is the minimumAfter the milk is in, let it simmer at least five minutes, stirring, so the starch fully swells and the floury edge cooks off. This heavier flour proportion benefits from longer than the original suggests.
- The pointed strainerA conical sieve — a chinois. Any fine sieve will do the same job of catching lumps and the nutmeg gratings. If the sauce is smooth, straining is optional.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained amount; pre-ground nutmeg is flatter and easier to overdo. White pepper rather than black keeps the sauce visually clean.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough to sauce vegetables or fish for four to six, or to bind a gratin.
White sauce is the workhorse of nineteenth-century English cookery, descended from the French béchamel and reproduced in a great many household manuals of the period, usually with several graded versions — a rich one built on cream or stock, a plain one on milk, and an "economical" one like this where the butter is halved and flour takes up the slack. That gradation is the point: Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was written for households that could not treat butter as a free ingredient. These sauces are foundations rather than dishes — learn the roux and you have parsley sauce, cheese sauce, onion sauce and the binding for a dozen made-over dinners from cold meat. The nutmeg is a survival from much older English seasoning habits, in which it was a standard seasoning for milk-based savoury dishes.