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Drawn Butter Sauce
1/3 cup butter 1 1/2 cups hot water 3 tablespoons flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Melt one-half the butter, add flour with seasonings, and pour on gradually hot water. Boil five minutes, and add remaining butter in small pieces. To be served with boiled or baked fish.
Brown Sauce I 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup Brown Stock 1/2 slice onion 1/4 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons flour 1/8 teaspoon pepper Cook onion in butter until slightly browned; remove onion and stir butter constantly until well browned; add flour mixed with seasonings, and brown the butter and flour; then add stock gradually, bring to the boiling-point, and let boil two minutes.
Brown Sauce II (Espagnole) 1/4 cup butter Sprig of parsley 1 slice carrot 6 peppercorns 1 slice onion 5 tablespoons flour Bit of bay leaf 2 cups Brown Stock Sprig of thyme Salt and pepper Cook butter with carrot, onion, bay leaf, thyme, parsley, and peppercorns, until brown, stirring constantly, care being taken that butter is not allowed to burn; add flour, and when well browned, add stock gradually. Bring to boiling-point, strain, and season with salt and pepper.
A plain white roux sauce thinned with water rather than milk or stock, meant to be poured over fish. It comes together in under ten minutes and needs only attention to the whisk.
- Add the water hot, and graduallyCold water hitting a hot roux sets up lumps that are hard to whisk out. Have the water at a simmer and pour it in a thin stream, whisking, before the pan goes back to a full boil.
- The five-minute boil is the pointWater-based flour sauces taste pasty if pulled early. Five minutes at a gentle boil cooks out the raw starch; stir the bottom of the pan so it does not catch.
- Finish off the heatFinish with the reserved butter -- The recipe simply says to add the remaining butter in small pieces after the five-minute boil; it does not specify the pan be off the heat. Stirring the pieces in at the end, rather than boiling them, is what gives the sauce its gloss and body.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half, enough for four to six servings of poached or baked fish. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a spoonful of hot water.
- Season at the end as wellAn eighth teaspoon of pepper and half a teaspoon of salt is a starting point for a sauce carrying no stock. Taste after the butter goes in, and add lemon juice if the fish is rich.
- On the brown sauces that followBoth depend on browning butter and flour without scorching them; the moment the roux smells nutty and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell it is ready for stock. Espagnole is strained, so the vegetables and herbs are there for flavour only and need no fine cutting.
Drawn butter is among the older English sauces for fish, and the name no longer describes what the cook does: in earlier English cookery "drawn" or "melted" butter was commonly butter worked with a little flour and water so it would hold together rather than separate in the boat, though the origin of "drawn" itself is not settled. By the time American domestic-science writers were compiling books like this one, the sauce had been standardised into a flour-butter-liquid formula of the kind that recurs across such chapters, the liquid varying with the sauce. Espagnole, listed here as Brown Sauce II, is the classical French version codified in professional kitchens in the nineteenth century; its appearance in a household manual beside a plain water-thickened butter sauce suggests how far French method had been absorbed into American middle-class teaching.