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Roux for Thickening Sauces (Dark)
1 ounce butter; 1 1/2 ounces dried flour; 2 cups stock. Put the butter in a saucepan and melt slowly; then add the flour, stirring with a wooden spoon until it is a light brown in color; it will require about ten minutes. Take it from the fire and let it cool for two or three minutes and stir in the stock. Return to the fire and stir until it boils, and let it simmer until it is sufficiently thick. It should be stirred until very smooth. For white roux use white stock and remove the butter and flour from the fire as soon as perfectly blended, and before it has become colored.
A basic brown roux with stock added, closer to what a modern cook would call a velouté or espagnole base than to the dry roux of Creole cooking. The proportions are given by weight, which makes them easy to scale.
- Weights to volume1 ounce butter is 2 tablespoons; 1 1/2 ounces flour is about 1/3 cup. Two cups of stock to that amount of thickening gives a pourable sauce rather than a paste.
- "Dried flour"Some period books call for flour warmed or dried before use, which speeds browning and reduces raw-flour taste, though the phrase may here mean no more than plain dry flour. Modern all-purpose flour straight from the bag works; a few minutes in a dry skillet over low heat will dry it if you want to.
- The hinge: cool before adding liquidTaking the pan off the heat for two or three minutes before the stock goes in is the whole trick. Hot fat and hot flour meeting cold liquid at full heat spits and seizes into lumps; a brief rest lets the mixture accept the stock smoothly.
- Ten minutes is a guide, not a ruleOn a modern burner a light brown comes in six to ten minutes over medium-low heat, with constant stirring. Judge by color and a nutty smell, not the clock, and pull it early if it starts to smell sharp — scorched roux is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- Stock temperatureWarm (not boiling) stock added in two or three additions, whisking between, gives the smoothest result. A whisk is more effective here than the wooden spoon the original specifies, though the spoon is right for the browning stage.
- Simmer for flavor as well as bodyTen to fifteen minutes at a bare simmer cooks out any pastiness and lets the sauce reduce to coating consistency. Skim any butter that separates and rises.
- White rouxThe recipe gives no time here: pull the pan as soon as the butter and flour are perfectly blended and before any color develops, which may be only a minute or two. Use a light stock and keep the heat low.
- YieldAround 2 cups of sauce, slightly less after the simmering reduces it, enough for four to six servings.
Roux came into English-language cookery from French practice; Carême's early nineteenth-century codification of the sauces helped fix butter-and-flour thickening as the standard alternative to older methods using bread, almonds or reduced stock alone, though butter-and-flour thickening was in English books well before that. The distinction between brown and white roux — a matter only of how long the flour cooks — is the practical foundation of the classical sauce system, and giving both in one entry was an efficient way to hand a home cook the pair.