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Drawn Butter Egg Sauce
Cook together, until well mixed, a tablespoon each of butter and flour. Add 'a cup of the water in which the fish boiled. Simmer five minutes, season highly with salt and mildly with pepper and serve in a tureen in which have been placed half a dozen slices of hard-boiled egg.
A classic drawn butter sauce, thin by design, meant to be spooned over boiled fish. The single most important thing is the liquid: it must be the fish cooking water, which carries the gelatin and salt that make this taste of anything at all.
- Use the fish waterPlain water or milk turns this into a bland white sauce. Reserve a cup of the court bouillon or salted water the fish poached in, and strain it before use if the fish shed skin or bones.
- "Cook together, until well mixed"This is a white roux: melt the butter over medium-low heat, whisk in the flour, and cook one to two minutes so the flour loses its raw taste but takes no color.
- Add the liquid off the boilAdd the liquid gradually -- Whisk the cup of fish water into the roux a little at a time. Adding it all at once is what produces lumps.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid gives a deliberately thin, pourable sauce. For a coating sauce, use a tablespoon and a half of each.
- "Season highly with salt"Taste first. If the fish was boiled in well-salted water, that water is already seasoned and further salt may be unnecessary.
- The eggs go in the tureen, not the panSlicing hard-boiled egg into the hot sauce and stirring would break it up into crumbs. Lay the slices in the serving vessel and pour the sauce over so they stay intact.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for two to three servings of boiled fish. Best made while the fish drains.
"Drawn butter" in nineteenth-century American and English cookery meant butter melted and thickened, usually with a little flour and hot water, rather than the clarified butter the phrase suggests today. It was the standard accompaniment to boiled fish in an era when fish was very often poached whole and served plain, and the cookbooks of the period print a whole family of variants built on the same base: egg sauce, caper sauce, parsley sauce, anchovy sauce, lobster sauce. The egg version was particularly associated with boiled salt cod and with salmon, and survives in New England as the sauce for salt fish dinners.