Vegetables
Mushroom Sauce Melt 2 tablespoons butter and add 2 tablespoons of flour. When bubbling, add slowly 1/4 cup of mushroom liquor and 3/4 cup of milk. Season to taste and add 1/4 cup of chopped mushrooms. Heat and serve with steak.
Mint Sauce 1/4 cup finely chopped mint leaves ½ cup vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar Add sugar to vinegar. When dissolved pour over mint and cook on stove 30 minutes. If vinegar is very strong, dilute with water.
Tart Sauce Make same as white sauce, but add enough lemon juice or cider vinegar to make sufficiently tart. This is excellent for fish or vegetables.
Tomato Sauce for Meat Mix 1/2 pint of stewed and strained tomatoes, 1 bay leaf, a little parsley and 1 onion and cook 15 minutes.
Melt 2 tablespoons butter, add 2 tablespoons of flour and when bubbling add the tomato slowly. Season with 1/2 teaspoon salt, sprinkle of pepper, a little paprika and 1 teaspoon of sugar.
Cook until smooth.
White Sauce One-fourth cupful of butter and 1 heaping tablespoon of flour and stir until well blended. Pour on gradually 1 cupful of milk and stir constantly. After it thickens, beat until it becomes smooth and glossy. This is a palatable sauce for fish, creamed onions, creamed veal, creamed potatoes, etc.
Drawn Butter Sauce Melt 3 tablespoons butter and add 3 tablespoons flour. Add slowly 1½ cups of hot water until it boils and season with salt to taste. Serve with fish or lobster.
Egg Sauce for Fish Melt 1 heaping tablespoon butter in a saucepan and blend with this 1 tablespoon of flour. Then add gradually 1 cup of boiling water. Cook, stirring briskly until sufficiently thick.
Add salt, pepper and paprika to taste.
When ready to serve, cut into the sauce 1 hard-boiled egg:
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A run of basic sauces, nearly all built on the same butter-and-flour roux. Get the proportions and the whisking right and the whole set follows.
- The roux ratioEqual spoons of butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a medium sauce that coats a spoon. The white sauce as printed calls for 1/4 cup butter to a single heaping tablespoon of flour, which is far more fat than the flour can carry; use 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour per cup of milk unless you want a deliberately loose, buttery sauce.
- Cook the flour"When bubbling" means the butter and flour have foamed together for a minute or two. Stopping short leaves a raw, pasty taste that no amount of seasoning covers.
- Add liquid slowly, off the heatPull the pan aside, add a splash, whisk until smooth, then continue. Dumping in a cupful at once is what produces lumps.
- Mushroom liquorThis is the liquid from canned or stewed mushrooms. Soaking liquid from dried mushrooms, strained of grit, works as well and is stronger; the water from sauteing fresh mushrooms will do at a pinch.
- Drawn butter sauce quantityThe liquid measure here has lost its fraction in printing. For 3 tablespoons each of butter and flour, 1 1/2 cups of hot water gives the correct pouring consistency.
- Mint sauce timingThirty minutes of boiling turns the mint drab and grassy. Bring the sweetened vinegar just to a boil, pour it over the chopped mint, and let it stand off the heat for half an hour instead. The vinegar quantity as printed is very high against 1/4 cup of mint -- many recipes use nearer half a cup to a cup -- and the recipe itself allows for diluting.
- Tomato sauceHalf a pint is one cup. Fish out the bay leaf and the onion before combining the tomato with the roux, or strain the whole lot; the recipe assumes they are aromatics rather than body.
- Seasoning and finishSalt these at the end, once the sauce has thickened, and add a scrape of nutmeg to the white sauce if it is going over onions or veal. The egg sauce is better with the hard-boiled egg chopped in off the heat, so the white does not toughen.
- YieldEach of the roux-based sauces makes about a cup, enough for four servings of fish or vegetables. They thicken as they cool and thin again with a spoonful of hot milk or water.
The white sauce here underlies a great many creamed dishes in American home cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - creamed onions, creamed chipped beef, scalloped potatoes, the binding of countless casseroles. Cookery schools of the period taught it as a single technique with graded proportions, thin for soups, medium for creaming, thick for croquettes, and books like this one repeat the lesson in shorthand. "Drawn butter" in this English-derived usage does not mean clarified butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce for fish, which is why it appears here as a separate preparation made with water rather than milk. Mint sauce with vinegar and sugar is the standard English accompaniment to lamb, and is usually traced to the sharp, sweetened sauces of earlier English cookery; it passed to American tables in much the same form.