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Drawn Butter Sauce
1/3 or 1/2 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 pint boiling water 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon salt Prepare as a white sauce.
A butter-and-flour sauce built on water rather than milk, which is what makes it useful in a meatless kitchen. The single line of instruction assumes the reader already knows the white sauce method.
- "Prepare as a white sauce"Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the roux a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the boiling water gradually, whisking, and simmer until it thickens and loses any raw-flour taste. The recipe specifies boiling water, so add it hot as directed.
- Lemon juice goes in lastAdd the lemon juice and parsley off the heat, after thickening. Acid stirred in early slackens a flour-bound sauce and dulls the parsley.
- A pint is two cupsWith 1/4 cup flour to 2 cups liquid this is about a medium sauce, pourable rather than heavily coating. For something thicker, use the water more sparingly.
- Not clarified butterIn British usage "drawn butter" generally means melted butter served plain. In American cookbooks of this period it usually means a flour-thickened sauce like this one, which is why no clarifying step appears.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings. It is the standard dressing for boiled or steamed vegetables, poached fish, and asparagus; ladle it over at the table rather than holding it long, since a water-based sauce skins and separates on standing.
Drawn butter sauce was the workhorse of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery, appearing in Mrs. Lincoln, Fannie Farmer and dozens of household manuals as the default accompaniment to boiled fish and plain vegetables. Its virtue in a book like this one is that it needs no milk, no stock and no meat drippings: water, butter, flour and a little acid produce a sauce with body and richness from the pantry alone. Meatless Cookery reflects a period in which meat conservation was promoted as a patriotic duty, and in which meatless cooking reached beyond the Lenten cooks and vegetarians who had previously been its main audience. The lemon and parsley here do the work that a fish or veal foundation would otherwise have done, which is a fair summary of the whole book's method.