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Drawn Butter Sauce
1/4 cup shortening 2 tablespoons flour 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1 cup boiling water Make like a white sauce.
A plain flour-thickened sauce of the kind that once accompanied boiled fish and vegetables. The instruction "make like a white sauce" assumes the reader already knows the roux method, so the technique is worth spelling out.
- Method in fullMelt the fat, stir in the flour, salt and pepper, and cook the paste a minute or two without letting it colour. Add the boiling water gradually, whisking hard between additions, then simmer three to five minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Use butter, despite the wordingThe recipe says "shortening," but a sauce named for drawn butter has nothing else to carry its flavour. Four tablespoons of butter (the same quantity, 1/4 cup) gives the intended result.
- Water, not milkThis is what separates drawn butter from a white sauce proper: the liquid is water, so the sauce stays lighter and less rich than a creamy white sauce. Fish cooking liquid or a light stock is a legitimate substitution.
- Boiling liquid mattersBoiling liquid -- the recipe specifies boiling water, added gradually to the hot roux and whisked hard between additions to keep the sauce smooth.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of flour to one cup of liquid is a medium sauce, thick enough to coat but still pourable. For a thinner sauce over delicate fish, cut the flour to one tablespoon.
- FinishingA teaspoon of lemon juice, a spoonful of chopped parsley, or a chopped hard-cooked egg stirred in at the end are the usual additions, and produce what were often printed separately as egg sauce or parsley sauce.
- YieldMakes about one cup, enough to sauce fish or vegetables for four.
Drawn butter was a long-established sauce in English and American cookery, and the name preserves an older sense of "drawing" butter -- usually explained as melting or clarifying it, though the derivation is traditional rather than firmly documented. Early versions were little more than melted butter thickened with a scrap of flour. By the nineteenth century it was a common accompaniment to boiled fish, asparagus and other plainly cooked vegetables in Anglo-American households, and cookbook after cookbook printed a version. Here it has been reduced to a four-line formula, cross-referenced to white sauce, and made with shortening rather than the butter it is named after.