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English Drawn Butter
Put two ounces of butter into a frying pan to melt; when melted, add two tablespoonfuls of flour; mix until smooth, then add one pint of boiling water stirring quickly and continually until it thickens, then add a teaspoonful of salt, a little white pepper and two ounces of cold butter cut into bits; stir until it is dissolved. The great point in preparing drawn butter is to take from the fire as soon as it thickens. For this sauce it is very essential to have good butter. Serve with asparagus, boiled fish, cauliflower, etc.
A plain flour-thickened butter sauce, essentially a white sauce made with water rather than milk. It comes together in five minutes and the whole thing turns on when you stop cooking it.
- Take it off the heat the moment it thickensThe recipe says so explicitly. The cold butter goes in at that point, stirred until dissolved rather than boiled, and prolonged boiling after the water is added can thin a flour-thickened sauce.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (55 g); two tablespoons of flour is about half an ounce (15 g). A pint here is 2 cups (475 ml) in American books of this period, 20 fl oz if the book is English — either gives a pourable sauce, the smaller measure a slightly thicker one.
- Use a saucepan"Frying pan" in this instruction simply means a shallow pan on the stovetop. A heavy saucepan gives you depth for whisking and less chance of scorching the roux.
- Cook the roux brieflyMix until smooth and let it bubble half a minute before the water goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. It should stay pale — this is a white roux, not a browned one.
- Boiling water, added fastThe recipe specifies boiling water stirred in quickly and continually. Have the kettle at a rolling boil and whisk hard as it goes in.
- Good butter mattersWith no milk, stock or wine in it, the sauce tastes mainly of butter and its seasoning of salt and white pepper. Unsalted butter of decent quality lets you control the teaspoon of salt, which is a fairly generous amount for a pint.
- YieldAbout two to two and a half cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside asparagus or a poached fish. It may separate on reheating once the finishing butter is in, so make it last.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of nineteenth-century English and American kitchens, the thing poured over boiled fish, asparagus, cauliflower and puddings when no richer sauce was called for. The name is older than this version and originally meant clarified or melted butter, said by tradition to be "drawn" off the milk solids; by the time it reaches books like this one it has become a thickened sauce. Its appeal is easy to see: it needs no stock, no long reduction and only a few minutes at the stove, and it stretches a small amount of good butter across a dish of plainly boiled vegetables or fish. French cooking knows a similar sauce as sauce blanche, and the milk-based version we now call b ed-out b chamel came to be the more familiar choice on both sides of the Atlantic.