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Drawn Butter (Pint hot water cupful butter)
1 pint hot water; 1/3 cupful butter; 2 tablespoonfuls flour; 1/2 teaspoonful salt; 1/2 saltspoonful white pepper.
An American drawn butter sauce: a plain white sauce made on water rather than milk, meant to be ladled over boiled fish, lobster or oysters. Only the ingredients are set out here, so the proportions are what matter most.
- What "drawn butter" means hereIn American books of this period drawn butter is a thickened sauce, not clarified butter. The English sense of the term — butter simply melted and the clear fat poured off — is a different thing entirely, and the flour in this list is what tells you which is meant.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this calls for an eighth of a teaspoon of white pepper. White is specified so the finished sauce stays pale.
- Butter measureOne-third cupful is about 5 1/3 tablespoons, roughly 75 g. The list gives no method, so how the butter is divided is not stated; some cooks reserved part of it to beat in off the heat for gloss.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to a pint of water gives a deliberately thin, pourable sauce. For something that coats rather than runs, more flour is needed.
- Hot water, added graduallyThe water is called for hot so the sauce comes together without lumping. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two first, then add the water in stages, whisking, and let it boil for a couple of minutes to lose the raw-flour taste.
- Seasoning and finishingWith water as the base the sauce is bland by design, a carrier for whatever it dresses. A squeeze of lemon, chopped parsley, capers or a little of the fish or oyster liquor are common period additions.
- YieldAbout two cups of sauce.
Drawn butter sauce was a workhorse of the nineteenth-century American fish course: boiled lobster, steamed clams and oyster dishes all came to table under it. The confusion between the two meanings of the phrase is old: English cookery writers used "drawn butter" for melted or clarified butter, while American ones increasingly meant a flour-thickened sauce. Making it on water rather than milk kept it cheap and let the flavour of the fish through, and the sauce could be built using the shellfish liquor in place of part of the water.