Brown Sauce
One tablespoon of butter, one tablespoon of flour, blended together. To this add one cup of boiling water. When cooked, add one-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Extract of Beef and season with Larkin Table Salt and Larkin white Pepper.
A single-cup pan sauce built on a roux and a spoonful of beef extract. The name is the one misleading part: as written, nothing here browns.
- Brown it, or it isn't brown sauceCook the butter and flour over medium-low heat, stirring, until the roux smells nutty and turns the color of peanut butter, five to eight minutes. The instruction "blended together" is doing a lot of unspoken work; the color and most of the flavor come from that step, not from the beef extract.
- Extract of beefA thick, dark, salty meat concentrate of the Bovril and Liebig type. A modern equivalent is beef bouillon paste or concentrated base; a quarter teaspoon in a cup of water is thin by current taste, and a teaspoon or more is closer to a usable gravy.
- Salt lastBeef extract and bouillon bases are heavily salted. Add the extract, taste, then salt, rather than the other way round.
- Boiling water, added graduallyPour it in a splash at a time, whisking to a smooth paste before each addition. All at once into hot roux will steam violently and can leave lumps.
- "When cooked"Simmer three to five minutes after the liquid is in. Flour needs that long to lose its raw taste and for the sauce to reach its final thickness, which will be light-bodied rather than gravy-thick.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough for four modest servings over meat, croquettes or toast.
- Larkin brand namesThe three Larkin products called for are simply butter's companions: beef extract, table salt and white pepper. Any equivalents work; the brand specificity is advertising, not technique.
Brown sauce is often said to be the household descendant of the classical espagnole, which in a professional kitchen meant browned flour, browned bones and hours of stock. Domestic cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collapsed that into a butter-and-flour roux plus water and a jar of meat extract, a shortcut made possible by the commercial beef concentrates that spread after Liebig's extract was industrialized in the 1860s. The repeated brand names here mark this as a promotional cookbook: the Larkin Company of Buffalo sold soap and groceries by mail and distributed recipe collections in which its own goods were named as ingredients, though not every ingredient carries a brand a.. Recipes like this one are worth reading as much for what they reveal about early grocery marketing as for the sauce itself, which is a plain, useful thing to know how to make.