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White Sauce for Vegetables
Put a pint of stock made from bones into a saucepan with an inch of lemon-rind, half a blade of mace, and six peppercorns. Let it simmer for half an hour, then strain it. Mix a table-spoonful of corn-flour smoothly with a little cold milk. Stir this into the stock, and also a little more milk to make up the measure to about three-quarters of a pint. Add pepper and salt if required. Simmer the sauce, stirring it well, for about five minutes; pour it out, stir into it a small piece of fresh butter until it is dissolved, and serve. Time altogether, one hour.
A light stock-based white sauce rather than a béchamel, thickened with cornflour instead of a roux. The infusion is the whole point: get that half hour of lemon peel, mace and pepper into the stock and the rest is five minutes' work.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so the sauce starts with 2½ cups of stock and finishes at about 15 fl oz, a scant 2 cups. That is enough to sauce vegetables for a small family.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchBritish corn-flour means cornstarch, not maize meal. One tablespoon in 15 fl oz gives a thin, pourable coating sauce; use two if you want it to cling to cauliflower or leeks.
- A blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold as flat "blades" or ground. Half a blade is a small piece; about ⅛ teaspoon of ground mace is the nearest equivalent, though unlike a blade it will not strain out of the stock.
- Lemon-rindAn inch of peel means the yellow zest only, pared with a peeler. Any white pith carried over will turn the sauce bitter over half an hour of simmering.
- Slurry techniqueMix the cornflour with cold milk to a smooth cream before it meets the hot stock, and pour it in while stirring. Cornflour hitting hot liquid dry will seize into lumps that no amount of whisking recovers.
- The five minutes matterCornflour thickens on the boil but goes thin again if held at a hard simmer, and it loses its raw, chalky taste only after a few minutes' cooking. Bring it to a bare simmer, stir for five minutes, and take it off.
- Butter off the heatThe final butter is a finishing enrichment. Stir it in after the pan leaves the stove, as the original directs, so it emulsifies into a gloss rather than splitting out as oil.
- Stock quality"Stock made from bones" is not specified further; since the sauce is meant to stay pale and is seasoned at the end, a plain, lightly seasoned light stock suits it best. A dark or heavily seasoned commercial stock will overwhelm the mace and lemon and colour the sauce grey-brown.
This is the Victorian English household counterpart to what French kitchens called a velouté — though a true velouté is thickened with a roux rather than cornflour: a pale stock sauce, faintly aromatic with mace and lemon peel, meant to be poured over boiled vegetables that would otherwise arrive at the table plain. The choice of cornflour over a butter-and-flour roux is telling. Cornflour became widely available to British cooks over the second half of the nineteenth century, marketed as a clean, economical thickener, and domestic manuals of the period do use it for sauces where a cook wanted body without the labour and expense of a roux. Mace and lemon rind recur as a seasoning pair for white sauces and white stews of the period; neither discolours the sauce, and the same combination turns up repeatedly in Victorian recipes for fricassees and boiled fowl.