White Sauce
There are three White Sauces commonly used in cookery, the difference between them being in their thickness. Here are three with definitions as to their uses and the method of making them: Thin White Sauce (For use in creaming vegetables) 1 T butter 1 T flour 14 t salt Few grains pepper 1 C milk Medium Thick White Sauce (For use in creaming meats, fish, eggs, in making creamed vegetable sauces for meats, and in certain scalloped dishes.) 2 T butter 2 T flour 14 t salt Few grains pepper 1 C milk Thick White Sauce (For use in binding together croquettes, certain scalloped dishes and fish and meat loaves.) 4 T butter 1/2 C flour 14 t salt 1/8 t pepper 1 C milk All of these sauces are made as follows: Melt butter in a mediumsized saucepan, lift it over to edge of range, and stir in flour and seasonings. Return to heat and add milk, a little at a time, stirring with each addition so that flour will take up all of liquid before more is added. Continue in this way until all liquid is in, then bring sauce to boiling point, and let it simmer a moment or two, when it is ready to use.
A clear, useful set of three ratios that still underpins most creamed and scalloped dishes. A few of the printed figures have suffered in transcription, and the method assumes a coal range rather than a burner you can turn down.
- The mangled fractions"14 t salt" is 1/4 teaspoon in every case; the fraction bar has dropped out in printing. Read "1/8 t pepper" in the thick sauce as printed.
- The thick-sauce flour4 tablespoons butter to 1/2 cup (8 tablespoons) flour is out of step with the other two, which are strictly equal parts. The standard thick white sauce of this era is 4 tablespoons butter to 4 tablespoons flour per cup of milk, and the printed 1/2 C is almost certainly an error for 1/4 C. If you want a paste stiff enough to bind croquettes, the equal-parts version is what to use.
- The hingeCook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before the milk goes in. The recipe's instruction to lift the pan to the edge of the range and stir in the flour was presumably about avoiding scorching on a stove whose heat could not simply be turned down; on a gas or electric burner, keep it over low heat and let the roux bubble briefly so the sauce does not taste of raw flour.
- Adding the milkAdding it a little at a time with hard stirring is genuinely the reliable way to avoid lumps, though warm milk added all at once and whisked works just as well. Either way the sauce must come to a full boil to thicken completely.
- "Simmer a moment or two"Two to three minutes at a bare simmer is enough. Longer over direct heat risks scorching the milk solids on the pan bottom, which will show as brown specks and a burnt taste.
- YieldEach version makes about a cup of sauce, a little more in the case of the thick one.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt per cup is modest by modern palates, especially with unsalted butter. Taste at the end; a scrape of nutmeg is a common addition for sauces going over vegetables or eggs.
White sauce is the English-language kitchen's plain-spoken version of French b he time this book was compiled the three-tier system — thin, medium, thick, sorted by the tablespoons of butter and flour per cup of milk — had become a fixture of American domestic-science teaching. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and the cooking-school movement generally are usually credited with drilling these proportions into home cooks, and the phrasing here, with its list of approved uses for each grade, reads like a lesson copied from a class notebook. It is not a dish but a technique, the one that makes creamed chicken, scalloped potatoes, croquettes and a hundred casseroles possible from the same pan and the same three ingredients.