Drawn Butter
Take one-quarter pound of best fresh butter, cut it up and mix with it two teaspoonfuls flour; when thoroughly mixed, put it into a saucepan and add to it four tablespoonfuls cold water.
Cover the pan and set it in a kettle of boiling water, shake <??> round eontinually, always moving it the same way. When the butter is entirely melted and begins to simmer, then let it rest until it boils up. In melting butter for pudding, some substitute milk for water.--Mrs. Dr. S. Drawn Butter.
Cream together one-quarter pound fresh butter, with two heaping teaspoonfuls sifted flour; add to this six teaspoonfuls water.
Put it in a small tin saucepan and set it in a vessel of boiling water, until it begins to simmer, shaking it often.--Mrs. S. T.
Drawn Butter.
Rub a piece of butter in a little flour, add two or three tablespoonfuls boiling water.
Shake continually over the fire without letting it boil, till it thickens.--Mrs. P. W.
Three versions of the same English sauce, all of them a flour-thickened butter emulsion made over hot water. The whole trick is heat control: the sauce must thicken without ever breaking into oil and curd.
- The hinge: never let it boil hardDrawn butter holds together only as an emulsion of melted butter, water and a little starch. Bring it just to a simmer over water and take it off; a rolling boil splits it and you are left with greasy butter and a puddle of floury liquid.
- Quarter pound of butterOne stick, 4 oz, half a cup. With two teaspoons of flour and four tablespoons of water you get roughly two-thirds of a cup of sauce, enough for four servings of fish or vegetables.
- Set it in a kettle of boiling waterThis is a double boiler in period language. Use a heatproof bowl or a small saucepan over, not in, simmering water; the bottom of the upper vessel should not touch the water.
- Shaking always the same wayThe first receipt insists on moving it the same way throughout; continuous agitation does keep the emulsion together, though the insistence on a single direction is kitchen tradition rather than a technical requirement. A small whisk, moved steadily rather than beaten, does the same work with less drama.
- Tin saucepanMrs. S. T. specifies a small tin pan, tin being the common light kitchenware of the period; her reason is not given. Any small stainless or enamelled pan works; avoid bare cast iron, which holds heat and will carry the sauce past a simmer after you take it off.
- Mrs. P. W.'s quantities"A piece of butter" and "a little flour" are genuinely unmeasured. Follow the proportions of the first two versions -- roughly one teaspoon of flour per 2 oz of butter -- rather than guessing.
- The pudding variationSubstituting milk for water gives a sweeter, richer sauce for boiled and steamed puddings. Milk scorches more readily, which is another reason for the water bath.
- ServingMake it at the last minute and serve at once. It will not hold long over heat and does not reheat well; if it separates, it cannot reliably be brought back.
Drawn butter is the American name for what English cookbooks of the same period called melted butter -- the workhorse sauce of the Anglo-American table, poured over boiled fish, asparagus, cauliflower and puddings, and used as the base for parsley, egg and caper sauces. French cooks were famously scornful of it; the standing joke, repeated often enough to be traditional, was that England had a hundred religions and one sauce. The three versions here, each credited to a different contributor, show how Housekeeping in Old Virginia was assembled: Marion Cabell Tyree gathered receipts from a network of Virginia housewives and printed them side by side rather than reconciling them. The disagreements are small and telling -- four tablespoons of water against six teaspoons, creaming the flour in against rubbing it in -- and they are the sort of thing that gets settled in a kitchen rather than on a page.