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Cream Sauce (Cup cream cup milk cup flour)
1 cup cream 1 cup milk 1/4 cup flour 1 teaspoon salt Heat the milk and cream in a double boiler. Stir the flour smooth with a little cold water. When the milk is boiling hot, stir into it the flour mixture. Cook five minutes. Add the salt.
Milk may be used instead of part cream, when it is called White Sauce. Add one hard-boiled egg, chopped, to this to make Egg Sauce. Add one-fourth cup chopped parsley to make Parsley Sauce. Add one-half cup diced celery to make celery Sauce. Add one-half cup of finely chopped onion to make Onion Sauce. For Tomato Cream Sauce, add sufficient strained tomato to give the sauce a pretty pink color.
A thickened milk sauce built without butter, in the domestic-science manner: flour slaked in cold water rather than cooked into a roux. The variations at the end turn one base into six sauces.
- Cook the flour longer than five minutesFive minutes over a double boiler is not enough to lose the raw-flour taste, especially with an uncooked slurry. Give it 15 to 20 minutes in the double boiler, stirring now and then, or make a conventional butter-and-flour roux instead.
- The slurry needs to go in fastStir the flour and cold water until genuinely smooth, then pour it into the hot milk in a thin stream while whisking hard. Dumped in at once it sets into lumps that no amount of later stirring will disperse.
- Consistency and yieldA quarter cup of flour to two cups of liquid is a medium sauce, about the thickness for masking vegetables or creamed fish. It makes roughly 2 cups, enough for four to six servings.
- No butterUnlike a modern bechamel this base carries no fat beyond what is in the cream. It tastes noticeably leaner; a tablespoon of butter whisked in at the end, off the heat, brings it closer to a modern bechamel.
- Cook the celery and onion firstRaw diced celery and chopped onion stirred into a finished sauce stay crunchy and sharp. Sweat them in a little butter until soft, or simmer them in the milk and strain, before they join the sauce.
- Tomato cream sauce curdles easilyAcid plus hot milk is the classic split. Warm the strained tomato separately and whisk it into the sauce off the heat, adding it a spoonful at a time, and serve promptly rather than holding it hot.
- Season at the endA full teaspoon of salt in two cups is on the assertive side. Add half, taste after the flour has cooked out, and finish with white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg if the sauce is going over vegetables.