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Some Kitchen Kinks: Sauce
Cream Sauce. 1/2 pint milk. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1 teaspoonful flour. 1/2 teaspoonful salt. 1/4 teaspoonful pepper.
Heat the milk over boiling water; beat the butter and flour to a cream and stir into the hot milk. Cook five minutes, then add salt and pepper, and use. This sauce is suitable for boiled cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, etc. It is also a good sauce for escalloped dishes. This sauce may be modified by the addition of flavoring herbs.
Cream Mustard Sauce.
Make the cream sauce as directed above. Mix one tablespoonful of mustard with a teaspoonful of cold water and stir into the sauce about two minutes before serving. The quantity of mustard may be increased. or diminished, as one may desire the flavor strong or mild.
A thin white sauce built by whisking kneaded butter and flour into hot milk rather than by cooking a roux first. The proportions as printed are unusually lean, which is worth knowing before you start.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup of milk. The yield is about a cup of sauce, enough for a medium head of cauliflower or four servings of vegetables.
- The flour is the hingeOne teaspoon of flour to a cup of milk gives barely more than flavoured milk. For a sauce that coats, use one tablespoon of flour to the tablespoon of butter; for a properly napping sauce over scalloped dishes, two tablespoons of each.
- Beurre manie, not roux"Beat the butter and flour to a cream" means working the two together into a smooth paste, which is then stirred into the hot milk rather than cooked first as a roux. It works, but the flour has no chance to toast, so keep the five minutes of cooking honest or the sauce tastes pasty.
- Over boiling waterThe instruction means a double boiler, chosen because milk scorches on a coal range. Over direct low heat with a whisk you will get there faster; a double boiler is still the safer choice if you are holding the sauce.
- MustardA tablespoon of "mustard" here is dry mustard powder, slaked with cold water, not prepared table mustard. That is a forceful amount for a cup of sauce; start with a teaspoon or two and build.
- Adding mustard lateStirring the mustard in near the end preserves its pungency, which is volatile and driven off by prolonged cooking; added early, the sauce loses much of its bite.
- HerbsFor the herb variation, steep thyme, bay or parsley stems in the milk while it heats and strain them out before thickening rather than stirring chopped herbs into the finished sauce.
Despite the name, there is no cream in this cream sauce: it is a plain milk-thickened white sauce, close to what French kitchens call bechamel, though bechamel is properly roux-based, and what American cookbooks of the period called cream sauce or simply white sauce more or less interchangeably. Its ubiquity in turn-of-the-century household manuals reflects how much of the vegetable cookery of the day was boiled first and made palatable afterwards, and the mustard variation is the same economy applied to fish, ham and warmed-over scalloped dishes. The double-boiler instruction suggests an early date, since cooking over boiling water was the standard defence against the uneven, unregulated heat of a coal or wood range.