Drawn Butter
Two tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one-half cup of boiling water; the juice of one lemon; one-fourth teaspoon Larkin White Pepper; one-half teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt; two tablespoons of chopped parsley.
Like many entries in this book, the recipe is given as an ingredient list and assumes the cook knows what to do with it. This is a small flour-thickened butter sauce, and the order of operations is the whole recipe.
- The method the list impliesMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute without letting it color, then whisk in the boiling water off the direct heat and simmer until it thickens and loses any raw-flour taste. Lemon juice and parsley go in at the end, off the heat, so the acid does not thin the starch and the parsley stays green.
- Boiling water, not coldThe original specifies boiling water for a reason: added hot to a hot roux and whisked, it thickens smoothly. Half a cup to a tablespoon of flour gives a pourable sauce rather than a paste.
- "Drawn butter" does not mean clarified butterIn British usage drawn butter is often just melted butter; in American cookbooks of this period it is this thickened sauce, closer to a thin white sauce made with water instead of milk. Expect a light, glossy sauce, not clear fat.
- Larkin ingredientsLarkin White Pepper and Larkin Table Salt were house-brand grocery items from the Larkin Co. of Buffalo. Any white pepper and fine salt will do; white pepper is worth keeping to, since black specks show badly in a pale sauce.
- The lemon is assertiveA whole lemon's juice — 2 to 3 tablespoons — into half a cup of sauce is sharp by modern taste and will thin it noticeably. Add it in stages and stop when it suits the dish.
- Yield and servingSomething under a cup once made up, enough for about four servings. Sauces of this kind were commonly served with boiled or steamed fish, asparagus, cauliflower and boiled fowl; make it while the vegetables finish, as it does not hold or reheat well.
- If it breaks or gets pastyA lump-free finish depends on constant whisking as the water goes in; a thick sauce loosens with another spoonful of hot water. Straining it costs you the parsley, so fix the texture before that goes in.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century American and English kitchens — the thing poured over boiled fish, boiled greens and boiled fowl in households that had no stock pot going and no time for a hollandaise. Water-based rather than milk- or stock-based, it needed nothing that was not already on hand, which is why it turns up in nearly every general cookbook of the era, though it grew less common in the general cookbooks that followed. The Larkin brand names in the ingredient list are the mark of the book's origins: the Larkin Co. of Buffalo built an enormous mail-order business around soap and household goods sold through premium clubs, and grocery lines carrying its name were promoted in exactly this way, inside recipe collections that put the brand in front of the cook at the moment of use.