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Drawn Butter Sauce
1/4 cup butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 cup boiling water 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper For making, follow directions given for White Sauce No. 1.
A flour-thickened butter sauce built on water rather than milk, meant to be spooned over boiled or baked fish. The whole recipe rests on one cross-reference, so the method has to be reconstructed.
- The missing method"White Sauce No. 1" means melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the paste a minute without browning, then add the liquid gradually while whisking and simmer until it thickens. Here the liquid is boiling water, which thickens almost instantly, so add it in a thin stream rather than all at once.
- Use half the butter for the rouxMany period drawn butter recipes melt only part of the butter with the flour and beat the rest in off the heat at the end. This one instead points to White Sauce No. 1, which cooks all the butter in from the start, so holding some back is a departure from the recipe as written; cooks who did it said the late butter gave the sauce more gloss and a cleaner butter flavor.
- Do not boil it longA couple of minutes of simmering is enough to cook the starch. Longer and the water reduces and the sauce can turn pasty.
- Water, not milkThe point of the sauce is that it carries fish rather than dairy. If the fish was poached, substitute some of its strained cooking liquid for the water and the sauce improves markedly.
- Flour has changedGold Medal was a commercial wheat flour for which a modern all-purpose flour is a reasonable stand-in. Two tablespoons to one cup of liquid gives a medium sauce, about the thickness of heavy cream.
- YieldRoughly one cup, enough for four servings of fish. It does not hold well; make it while the fish rests and serve at once.
- Common additionsA teaspoon of lemon juice, chopped parsley, capers, or a chopped hard-cooked egg were all standard period variations and turn the same base into the sauces listed elsewhere in fish chapters of this period.
Drawn butter was the workhorse fish sauce of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cooking, and the name is older than the recipe: to "draw" butter is often said to have meant to melt and clarify it, so that a true drawn butter would have been simply warm melted butter. By the time cookbooks like this one were printed, the term had drifted to mean a thin flour-thickened sauce with butter in it, which stretched a quarter cup of butter over four plates. The branded flour in the ingredient list is worth noting in its own right. The instruction to "follow directions given for White Sauce No. 1" also shows how such books were organized, teaching one master method early and then treating every later sauce as a variation on it.