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Sauce for Vegetables
3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk 1 cup liquid in which the vegetable is cooked 1 teaspoon salt Put together as for white sauce. Milk may be used instead of the liquid in which the vegetable is cooked if desired.
A standard roux-based white sauce with half the liquid supplied by the vegetable cooking water. The proportions here are heavier than most modern béchamel — 3 tablespoons each of fat and flour to 2 cups liquid gives a medium-thick coating sauce.
- "Put together as for white sauce"The book assumes you know the method: melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the paste a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the liquid gradually, whisking, and simmer until it thickens. Roughly 5 minutes of simmering after it thickens cooks out the raw flour taste.
- Warm the liquidVegetable water straight from the pot works well because it is already hot; cold milk added all at once to a hot roux is the usual cause of lumps. Add it in stages and whisk each addition smooth before the next.
- The cooking liquid is the pointUsing the water the vegetable was boiled in recovers the water-soluble vitamins and flavour that would otherwise go down the drain. It also means the sauce tastes of the vegetable it dresses.
- Which liquids to avoidCabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and turnip water turns sulphurous and bitter on reduction. Use the all-milk version for those, and save the vegetable water for peas, carrots, asparagus, beans and corn.
- SaltA full teaspoon for 2 cups of sauce assumes unsalted butter and unsalted cooking water. If the vegetables were boiled in salted water, start with a quarter teaspoon and correct at the end.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough to sauce vegetables for six to eight as a side dish, or to bind a casserole for four.
- Holding itA flour-thickened sauce skins over as it stands. Press plastic wrap or a butter paper directly onto the surface, or dot with butter, and thin with a little more hot liquid when you reheat.
Meatless cookery leaned hard on white sauce, and this entry shows why: with no meat drippings or pan gravy in the kitchen, a butter-and-flour sauce was the main way to make plain boiled vegetables into something substantial enough to anchor a plate. The technique itself is the French b hat that nineteenth-century writers classed among the mother sauces, and it was absorbed wholesale into American cooking-school teaching, where Fannie Farmer and her successors drilled it in fixed proportions — thin, medium and thick — as a foundation students memorized before anything else. The twist here is the vegetable cooking water, which reflects a growing awareness that boiling leached nutrients out of vegetables and into the pot; household writers responded with the practical instruction to stop throwing the water away.