Home › Sauce Recipes › White Sauce
White Sauce
I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) butter I oz. (I heaping tablespoonful) flour 1/2 pint (I cup) milk or water I bay leaf A few drops lemon juice Salt and pepper to taste the flour together in an Blend the butter and earthenware dish, then add the milk, bay leaf, and salt, stir over the fire until it boils and thickens, then remove the bay leaf, season it to taste with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, and it is ready.
To make it a sweet sauce add one tablespoonful of sugar and half a teaspoonful of extract.
A plain roux-thickened white sauce, written for an earthenware vessel set directly over the flame. The proportions are the standard ounce-of-fat-to-ounce-of-flour-per-half-pint, which gives a pouring sauce rather than a binding one.
- Weights vs. spoons1 oz of butter is 2 level tablespoons, and 1 oz of flour is closer to 3 tablespoons; the "heaping tablespoonful" equivalents given here are approximate at best. Weigh if you have a scale, or use 2 tbsp butter to 2 tbsp flour for a slightly lighter sauce.
- Earthenware on direct heatMost modern glazed earthenware and stoneware will crack over a burner. Use a heavy saucepan, or a flame-safe casserole with a diffuser, and keep the heat moderate.
- Cook the flourBlend butter and flour and let the paste bubble a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and pasty. The recipe skips this step but the result is better for it.
- Adding the milkWarm milk added gradually, with steady stirring, is the reliable route to a smooth sauce. Bring it just to a boil and hold it there a minute or two so it thickens fully.
- Lemon juiceA few drops only, stirred in off the heat at the end. Added while the sauce is boiling it can make milk sauces grainy.
- The sweet versionThe unnamed "extract" is almost certainly vanilla. One tablespoon of sugar and half a teaspoon of vanilla, and leave out the bay, pepper and lemon.
- YieldAbout a cup, enough to sauce vegetables or fish for three or four.
White sauce is the domestic English name for what French kitchens codified as b tera and flour cooked together, then let down with milk — b\kchamel when the milk is infused, plain white sauce when it is not. The bay leaf here is the vestige of that infusion: nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English cookery books routinely steeped bay, and often onion and peppercorns, in the milk before thickening it. Its appearance in a casserole-cookery book is practical rather than decorative; a book built around one-pot earthenware dishes needs a base sauce that can be made in the same vessel the food will be finished in, and the sweet variation at the end is simple thrift, letting a cook get a pudding sauce out of the same three ingredients.