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White Sauce (Tablespoons flour tablespoons)
4 tablespoons flour 4 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup hot milk Rub together the butter and the flour, adding gradually the hot milk. Cook this white sauce in a double boiler for ten to fifteen minutes. Add salt.
This is a very thick white sauce — closer to a binding paste than a pouring sauce — which is why it sits in the soups chapter rather than among the sauces.
- Read the ratio before you startFour tablespoons each of flour and butter to a single cup of milk gives roughly a quarter-cup of thickener per cup of liquid, about four times the flour in a thin pouring sauce. A base this thick would ordinarily be thinned with stock, vegetable water or more milk to make cream soups, or used to bind croquettes and cutlets, though the recipe itself does not say so.
- Rub together, not cooked firstThe instruction is to rub the raw butter and flour into a paste rather than cook a roux. Because the milk is hot, the paste disperses without lumping, but the flour needs the full cooking time to lose its raw taste.
- The double boiler is doing real workA sauce this thick scorches easily over direct heat. If you use a regular saucepan instead, keep it over low heat and stir constantly; ten to fifteen minutes in a double boiler is not excessive for this proportion of flour.
- Salt last, and reduce itA teaspoon of salt to one cup of milk is heavily seasoned by modern taste, and would only suit a base that is going to be diluted. Start with a quarter teaspoon and correct after thinning.
- Hot milk means scalded, not boilingHeat the milk until it steams and the surface shivers. Boiled milk will form a skin that shows up as specks in the finished sauce.
- YieldAbout one cup of thick base — enough to turn into three to four cups of cream soup once thinned.
- StorageCooled, the base sets almost solid and can be refrigerated three or four days. Whisk it into hot liquid rather than trying to soften it on its own.
White sauce built on butter and flour in equal volumes has been the spine of Anglo-American home cookery since the nineteenth century, when cooking schools began teaching it as a graded formula — thin for soups, medium for creamed vegetables, thick for binding and for croquettes. Its appeal was practical rather than decorative: without meat stock or drippings, milk thickened with butter and flour supplied the richness and body that made a vegetable soup feel like a meal. Vegetarian and reform cookery of the period leaned heavily on dairy and eggs for exactly that reason.