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White Sauce (Tablespoons butter tablespoons)
4 tablespoons butter 4 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt Heat the milk in a double boiler, but do not let it reach the scalding point. Rub butter, flour and salt together until smooth, then slowly pour over them the hot milk. Stir until smooth and thickened, cooking thoroughly until there is no raw taste.
A basic medium white sauce, made by the older kneaded-paste method rather than by cooking a roux first. The whole point is the last clause: cook it long enough that the flour loses its raw taste.
- The hinge: cook out the flourUncooked butter and flour stirred into milk thickens in a minute or two but tastes pasty. Keep it over the double boiler and stir for several minutes after it thickens, until the raw floury taste is gone.
- Beurre manié, not a rouxBeurre manie, not a roux -- Rubbing raw butter and flour into a smooth paste and letting the hot milk do the cooking is a distinct approach from melting the butter and cooking the flour in it first.
- "Do not let it reach the scalding point"Scalding is usually put at about 180F, when milk films and steams at the edges. Heat it hot but not steaming hard.
- Proportions4 tablespoons each of butter and flour to 2 cups milk is a medium sauce, the standard binding consistency of the period. Halve the butter and flour for a thin pouring sauce, double them for a croquette or souffle base.
- LumpsAdd the milk in a thin stream at first, whisking constantly, and only then in larger pours. A wire whisk works better than a spoon here.
- SaltA full teaspoon in 2 cups is on the generous side by modern palates, especially if the sauce is going over salted vegetables or into a cheese dish. Start with half and correct at the end.
- Yield and holdingMakes about 2 cups, enough to sauce roughly 2 pounds of cooked vegetables. It skins as it stands; press plastic wrap or a film of butter on the surface, and thin with a little milk when you reheat.
White sauce is the American domestic-science rendering of French bechamel, stripped of its onion, bay and long simmer and reduced to a memorizable formula: butter, flour, milk, salt, in thin, medium and thick proportions. Cooking schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often said to have taught it early, on the grounds that so much else in the repertoire branched off it add cheese and it is a cheese sauce, add eggs and crumbs and it binds a croquette, thin it and it is a cream soup. Where pan drippings or meat stock were not on hand, a kitchen could lean on milk and butter for richness, and this sauce was the vehicle that turned plain boiled vegetables into creamed dishes substantial enough to anchor a meal.