Cream Sauce
1/3 pint cream 2/3 pint milk 1 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons flour Heat the milk and cream to scalding in a double boiler. Moisten the flour with a little cold milk, and add to the hot milk and cream, stirring meanwhile. Cook thoroughly, and add salt.
Thin cream sauce is made by using one-half the amount of flour.
A butterless white sauce thickened with a cold-milk flour slurry rather than a roux. Simple, but the two things that go wrong are lumps and the raw-flour taste, and both are fixed at the same step.
- The hinge: cook it longer than you thinkThe hinge: cook it longer than you think. "Cook thoroughly" in a double boiler is usually taken to mean a good fifteen minutes or more of gentle heat with occasional stirring, not the two or three minutes a direct-heat roux sauce needs. Water-bath heat stays below boiling, so the starch gelatinizes slowly, and undercooked flour gives the sauce a chalky, pasty edge.
- Measures in American pintsThis is a US book, so a pint is 16 fl oz: 1/3 pint is 2/3 cup of cream and 2/3 pint is about 1 1/3 cups of milk. Total liquid is 2 cups, and the whole recipe yields roughly that much sauce.
- How thick it comes outFour tablespoons of flour to the pint of liquid works out at two tablespoons per cup, a medium sauce: thick enough for creamed and scalloped dishes. The half-quantity "thin cream sauce" -- one tablespoon to the cup -- is the pouring version for vegetables and toast.
- The slurryWhisk the flour into 3 or 4 tablespoons of cold milk until completely smooth before it goes anywhere near the hot pan, and pour it in a thin stream while stirring. Any dry pockets left in the slurry will survive as lumps; a quick pass through a sieve at the end costs nothing.
- Double boiler, or careThe double boiler exists here because dairy scorches and this sauce is stirred only intermittently. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat works if you stir more or less continuously and scrape the corners.
- Cream has changedEarly-twentieth-century "cream" was often thinner than modern heavy cream, in the general range of light or coffee cream. Modern light cream or half-and-half is likely closer to the original than heavy whipping cream, which will make a noticeably richer, heavier sauce.
- Season past the saltA teaspoon of salt for 2 cups is right, but the recipe stops there. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or a bay leaf steeped in the milk during scalding all belong to the same tradition and are worth adding.
Cream sauce is the plain American cousin of French bechamel, and a milk-based sauce does much of the work that meat drippings or stock would otherwise do. Vegetarian and "meatless" cookery in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century leaned heavily on dairy, eggs and cheese, and a well-made cream sauce is the base for creamed vegetables, scalloped casseroles, croquette bindings and cheese sauces. Notably, this version uses no butter at all -- the fat comes from the cream itself -- which produces a lighter, milkier sauce than a roux-based one.