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Cream Sauce
1 tablespoonful of flour 1 tablespoonful of butter ½ pint of cream or milk ½ teaspoonful of salt 2 dashes of pepper Melt the butter, being careful not to brown it; add the flour, mix until smooth; then add the cream or milk, stir continually until it boils; add salt and pepper, and use at once. If you are not quite ready to use it, stand it over boiling water to keep warm, stirring frequently to prevent a crust from forming on the top.
This sauce may be used with lobster chops, sweetbreads, chicken chops and other similar dishes.
A plain thin béchamel, written when white sauce was the backbone of every made dish. The proportions as printed need a second look.
- The suspect quantityOne tablespoon each of butter and flour will not thicken a pint and a half of milk into much more than flavoured milk. The printed "1½ pint" may well be a misreading of "½ pint" — one cup — which would give the standard thin white sauce of the period; the salt, printed as "1½ teaspoonful", would likewise suit a cup of milk at ½ teaspoon.
- Cook the roux, brieflyMelt the butter over low heat and stir the flour in for a minute or two without letting it colour. This is what removes the raw-flour taste; browning would darken the finished sauce, which is why the original warns against it.
- Adding the milkWhisk it in gradually rather than all at once, and keep whisking as it comes up to a boil. The sauce thickens right at the boil and needs a full minute there to set its final consistency.
- Holding itThe instruction to stand it over boiling water is sound — a double boiler or a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Pressing a piece of buttered paper or plastic directly on the surface prevents the skin as well as frequent stirring does.
- Cream or milkNineteenth-century "cream" ran thinner than today's heavy cream; light cream or half-and-half is the closer match. With heavy cream you may want to slacken the sauce with a little milk.
- "Chops" is not what you thinkLobster chops and chicken chops were croquette mixtures moulded into chop shapes, sometimes with a bit of macaroni pushed in to imitate the bone, then crumbed and fried. The sauce is there to pool under them.
- YieldWith the corrected half-pint of milk, about one cup of sauce — enough for roughly four servings as a napping sauce.
This is the workhorse sauce of the American cooking-school era, and it appears in a hot-weather book because the dishes it accompanied — croquettes, sweetbreads, moulded chicken mixtures — were the supper food of the 1880s rather than a roast. The cooking schools of the period drilled their students in a small set of standard sauces built on a butter-and-flour roux, the technique French cooks had codified as béchamel and which American manuals of the period simply called white sauce or cream sauce. The proportions were taught as a formula — a tablespoon of each per cup of liquid for a thin sauce, doubled for a thick one — so that a cook could scale it from a sauce to a binding for croquettes without a new recipe, which is exactly why the printed "1½ pint" here reads as an error rather than an intention.