Home › Vegetables › White Sauce
White Sauce
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk or white stock 1 teaspoon salt few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon pepper Melt butter, add flour, seasonings and liquid. Stir until the boiling point is reached. Boil five minutes, beating constantly.
A basic béchamel in the standard two-two-one proportion. The chief difficulty is the printed seasoning, which does not survive transcription intact.
- The seasoning amounts are wrong as printedThe seasoning amounts look wrong as printed -- a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of pepper in one cup of sauce is far too much, and the recipe already calls for cayenne separately, which suggests a fraction may have been lost from the pepper. Season to taste, starting at ½ teaspoon salt and a pinch of pepper.
- Cook the roux before the liquid goes inMelt the butter, stir in the flour, and let it bubble a minute or two before adding milk. Raw flour gives the sauce a pasty taste that no amount of later boiling removes.
- Add the liquid graduallyThe instruction to "add flour, seasonings and liquid" reads as one motion. Pour the milk in a little at a time, whisking smooth between additions, and lumps never form.
- Five minutes is rightUnlike many old timings, this one holds. Flour-thickened sauce needs several minutes at a simmer to lose its starchy edge and reach full thickening power. Keep the whisk moving; the bottom scorches quickly.
- White stockThe alternative liquid is a light veal or chicken stock, often used when the sauce accompanies meat. Any light chicken stock works, but cut the salt if it is a commercial one.
- Consistency and yieldThis makes about one cup, enough to coat vegetables for four. For a pouring sauce use half the butter and flour; for a binding sauce in croquettes, double them.
- Cayenne"few grains" means the barest pinch, meant to sharpen rather than heat. Here it goes in with the other seasonings rather than at the end. It appears frequently in American cookbooks of this period.
White sauce is the American domestic-science name for b"a cookbook says a good deal about how such books worked: the cooking-school method, with its fixed proportions and numbered spoonfuls, had become the common language of the household kitchen by the turn of the twentieth century. The two-tablespoons-butter, two-tablespoons-flour, one-cup-liquid formula was taught as a template rather than a dish, to be scaled thin for soups and thick for croquettes and cutlets. The name béchamel is generally traced to Louis de Béchameil, a steward in the household of Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional and the sauce almost certainly predates him.