Home › Introduction › In Cookery
In Cookery
Roux is used for thickening soups, sauces, and gravies, and may be brown, white, or fawn colour.
Brown Roux is made with equal quantities of butter and fine sifted flour; melt the butter, then stir in the flour gradually, and let it cook from 12 to 15 minutes, stirring all the time, for it must be as smooth as velvet, and it must be cooked until it is a nut-brown colour.
White Roux is made just in the same way, only it is not allowed to colour at all, and Fawn Roux must colour but slightly. One tablespoonful of Roux will as a rule thicken one pint of liquid..
It is best to let the Roux cool before stirring it to the stock or sauce. Roux will keep for some time, and must be put into jars.
A Liaison is a thickening made with yolks of eggs and milk or cream, or with roux, or with kneaded butter and flour, and is used to thicken white soups and sauces. Sauce thickened with
A technique entry rather than a dish, and still the most useful page in any book of this kind: get the roux right and half the sauce chapter follows. The proportions given are sound, though the timings assume a coal range and a heavy pan.
- The ratioEqual quantities of butter and flour should be read as equal by weight, not by spoonfuls. Measured by volume, flour is much lighter than butter, so equal spoonfuls give a fat-heavy, slack roux with less thickening power.
- Thickening powerOne tablespoon of roux to one pint (British pint, 20 fl oz / 570 ml) gives a light, pourable sauce. For a coating sauce that will nap a fish or bind a filling, use two to three tablespoons per pint.
- Brown roux takes longer than statedBrown roux may take longer than stated -- Twelve to fifteen minutes over gentle heat will often get you no further than fawn. On a modern hob a true nut-brown roux commonly wants 20 to 30 minutes at a low setting, and it colours faster at the end than at the beginning.
- Heat and panUse a heavy-based saucepan and medium-low heat. Flour scorches in thin aluminium, and a burnt roux is bitter and cannot be rescued — black specks mean start again.
- Brown roux thickens lessThe longer the flour cooks, the more of its starch breaks down. A dark roux may need half again as much as a white one to reach the same consistency, which is why brown sauces are often reduced as well as thickened.
- Why cool it firstThe advice to cool the roux before adding stock is not fussiness. A temperature difference between roux and liquid — cold roux into hot, or hot roux into cold — makes dispersal easier; hot into hot is the combination most likely to lump. Whisk, then bring to a simmer and hold it there several minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Storing itRoux keeps a week or more covered in the fridge and freezes well — a jar in the larder, as the book suggests, is not advisable in a warm modern kitchen since butter goes rancid. Freeze it in tablespoon portions.
- LiaisonThe egg-and-cream liaison is finished off the heat: whisk a little hot sauce into the yolks, return the mixture to the pan, and warm it without boiling. Above roughly 180F (82C) the yolks scramble and the sauce curdles.
- Kneaded butterThe "kneaded butter and flour" mentioned is beurre mani e; to a paste raw, whisked into a simmering sauce in small pieces at the end. It is a corrective for a sauce that turned out thin, not a substitute for a properly cooked roux.
Roux is French in name and in method, and its arrival in English kitchens marks the point at which sauces stopped being thickened with pounded bread, almonds or blood and started being thickened with cooked flour and fat — a shift generally traced to seventeenth-century French practice and associated in the nineteenth with Car e;me's classification of the leading sauces. That a British book of this kind opens with roux rather than with any dish suggests what "high class" cookery was taken to mean: it meant French, and it meant that a cook was judged on her sauces. The instruction that the roux be "as smooth as velvet" is the whole of the professional standard in five words.