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Thin White Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 1 cup scalded milk 1 1/2 tablespoons flour 1/4 teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Put butter in saucepan, stir until melted and bubbling; add flour mixed with seasonings, and stir until thoroughly blended; then pour on gradually while stirring constantly the milk, bring to the boiling-point and let boil two minutes. If a wire whisk is used, all the milk may be added at once.
A standard pouring-consistency béchamel, thinner than the sauce most modern recipes call for. The proportions are the whole point: 1½ tablespoons flour to a cup of milk gives a sauce that coats a spoon lightly and runs off.
- Yield and consistencyMakes about 1 cup. "Thin" here is a technical grade: cookbooks of this type generally graded white sauces by the amount of flour per cup of milk, with medium and thick versions using progressively more.
- Scalded milkHeating milk to just below boiling mattered when milk was raw and unrefrigerated. With pasteurised milk it is largely optional, though warm milk blends faster and reduces lumping.
- Cook the rouxBlending the flour into the bubbling butter gives it a moment to cook; a roux stirred only briefly can leave a raw, pasty taste in the finished sauce.
- The two-minute boilThis is not optional. Flour-thickened sauces reach full thickening power only at the boil, and two minutes at a bubble sets the final consistency. A sauce pulled off early keeps thinning as it stands.
- Whisk versus spoonThe note about adding all the milk at once is sound. With a whisk the starch disperses before it can clump, and the gradual-addition ritual is only needed if you are working with a wooden spoon.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon salt per cup is on the light side for modern palates used to salted butter and stock-based sauces. Taste after the boil and adjust.
- Holding itA skin forms within minutes. Press buttered paper or plastic directly onto the surface, or float a thin film of melted butter, if it must wait.
White sauce of this kind is the English-language kitchen's version of the French béchamel, and by the late nineteenth century American cookery schools were teaching it as a table of ratios — thin, medium, thick — to be memorised and applied. That systematising impulse is generally associated with the Boston Cooking School tradition, where recipes were taught as arithmetic rather than as a knack passed hand to hand. The thin grade was chiefly used as a base to be flavoured with parsley, egg, capers, or a fish liquor, and as the foundation of creamed dishes and scalloped bakes.