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Sauce
1 tablespoon Five Roses flour 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk Salt and pepper.
Cook and pour over when ready to serve.
A bare-bones white sauce, written for cooks who already knew the method and needed only the proportions. The one thing to note is that the fat and flour are not in the usual balance.
- The ratio is unusualStandard thin white sauce is equal parts butter and flour — 1 tablespoon each per cup of milk. Here the butter is doubled, which gives a glossier, richer sauce that will not thicken much beyond pouring consistency. If you want it to coat, use 2 tablespoons of flour to match the butter.
- Method the book assumesMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the paste a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the milk gradually off the heat before returning it to a simmer. "Cook" in this shorthand means cook the flour out — a sauce pulled too early tastes pasty.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring-wheat flour, higher in protein than typical modern US all-purpose flour, though Canadian all-purpose flour is still milled from hard wheat. Any plain all-purpose flour works here; the protein content makes no meaningful difference to a roux this small.
- Salt and pepperThe seasoning marks this as a savoury sauce: it would suit a suet or vegetable pudding, or fish and boiled meats, rather than a sweet one. For a sweet pudding, drop the pepper and add sugar and vanilla or nutmeg.
- LumpsWarming the milk first and adding it in three or four stages, whisking smooth between, is the reliable route. A sauce that has gone lumpy can be pushed through a fine sieve.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four modest servings. It thickens as it cools and skins over; keep it covered with a disc of buttered paper or whisk in a spoonful of hot milk before serving.
White sauce of this kind — butter and flour cooked together, then let down with milk — descends from the French *sauce blanche* that entered English and North American cooking through nineteenth-century domestic manuals, where it was drilled as a foundation to be varied endlessly with cheese, parsley, eggs or onion. Its appearance in the *Five Roses Cook Book* as four lines with no method reflects how the book worked: published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households as advertising for its flour, it assembled contributions from home cooks across the country, and those cooks did not need to be told how to make a roux.