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Cream or White Sauce
Cream or White Sauce is what the French know as roux, and is the sauce used with all sorts of mixtures and as the base of nearly all other sauces. To make thin White Sauce use one tablespoon of butter, one tablespoon of flour, and one cup of milk or cream. Melt the butter and blend the flour into it. Slowly add the milk, which must first be heated. Do not boil as that destroys the flavor, but cook thoroughly below the boiling point.
A working formula rather than a finished dish: one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon flour, one cup milk gives the thin sauce, and everything else in the sauce chapter builds from it.
- The hinge: cook the flourLet the butter and flour bubble together for a full minute or two before any liquid goes in, stirring constantly, without letting it colour. Flour that has not been cooked in fat gives a sauce that tastes pasty no matter how long it simmers afterwards.
- "Do not boil" needs qualifyingThe warning protects the flavour of the cream, but a flour-thickened sauce needs sustained heat before the starch swells fully and the raw taste goes. Bring it close to bubbling and hold it there for two or three minutes rather than merely warming it through.
- Roux is not the sauceIn French practice roux is the cooked butter-and-flour paste alone; milk added to it makes béchamel. The looser usage here was common in American books of the period.
- Thicker versionsThis entry gives only the thin sauce. Keep the cup of milk and use two tablespoons each butter and flour for a medium sauce suitable for creamed dishes and gratins, three to four tablespoons each for a thick binding sauce for croquettes or souffle bases.
- Heated milkWarming the milk first, as directed, is worth doing: it lets you add liquid faster without the roux seizing into lumps. Add it in three or four stages, whisking smooth each time before the next.
- Seasoning is left outNo salt is specified. A cup of sauce takes roughly a quarter teaspoon of salt, white pepper, and, if it is going to vegetables or gratins, a scrape of nutmeg. A bay leaf and a slice of onion steeped in the milk before it goes in adds a good deal.
- Yield and holdingThis makes about one cup. It will form a skin as it sits; press plastic wrap or a butter paper directly onto the surface, and thin it with a little more hot milk when reheating over low heat.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born into slavery in Tennessee and spent years cooking in Pullman private railcars before working for the subsidiary of a Chicago steel company. That professional background shows in an entry like this one: rather than a dish, it is a base formula stated in a clean 1:1:1 ratio, the sort of thing a cook builds a whole service around. White sauce held that position in American cookery for most of the twentieth century, and ratio-based teaching of it was widely current after Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School book of the 1890s. The identification of the sauce with the French roux is loose by later standards, but it reflects how thoroughly French kitchen vocabulary had entered American hotel and railway cooking by then, sometimes faster than its precise meanings did.