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Butter, Melted, made with Milk
INGREDIENTS. -1 teaspoonful of BUTTER, TO KEEP FRESH. flour, 2 oz. of butter, 1/3 pint of milk, a few grains of salt. AVERAGE COST, 3d.
Mix the butter and flour smoothly together on a plate, put it into a lined saucepan, and pour in the milk. Keep stirring it one way over a sharp fire; let it boil quickly for a minute or two, and it is ready to serve. This is a very good foundation for onion, lobster, or oyster sauce; using milk instead of water makes it look much whiter and more delicate.
TIME.-Altogether, 10 minutes.
This is the Victorian English foundation sauce known as "melted butter" — not clarified butter, but a thin flour-and-butter sauce closer to what a modern cook would call a béchamel. A few conventions need translating.
- The name"Melted butter" in nineteenth-century English cookery means a thickened white sauce, the standard base under parsley, caper, lobster and oyster sauces. If you are expecting drawn or clarified butter, this is not it.
- 1/3 pint of milkAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so a third of a pint is about 6 1/2 fl oz — roughly 3/4 cup, or 190 ml. With 2 oz (55 g) butter this gives a rich, loose sauce.
- The flour quantity is doubtfulOne teaspoonful of flour is very little to thicken 1/3 pint (about 3/4 cup) of milk against 2 oz of butter; comparable melted-butter recipes generally call for more. Treat the figure as possibly unreliable and work up from about 1 1/2 tablespoons of flour if you want a coating consistency.
- Kneaded, not cooked, rouxThe butter and flour are worked together cold on a plate — what is now called beurre manié. There is no roux-cooking stage, so the sauce keeps a pale colour but can taste faintly of raw flour unless you let it simmer a full two or three minutes.
- A lined saucepanBeeton most likely means tin-lined copper, the usual Victorian pan; the lining kept dairy and acid off bare copper. Any heavy-based stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
- A sharp fireBrisk, direct heat; medium-high on a modern hob. The recipe wants a quick boil of a minute or two, so keep it moving.
- Stirring one wayA convention repeated throughout nineteenth-century cookery books rather than a demonstrable technique. Constant stirring is what matters; the direction is unlikely to make any difference.
- YieldAbout 3/4 cup of sauce, enough for four modest servings, or as the base for the onion, lobster or oyster sauces mentioned.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for well over a century, and its ubiquity was a standing joke among Continental visitors — the line that England has sixty religions and only one sauce is usually attributed to the Neapolitan ambassador Domenico Caraccioli, though the attribution and the wording vary from telling to telling, and the claim that melted butter was the target is tradition rather than record. Beeton gives several versions, with water, with milk, and thickened in various ways, precisely because so many other sauces in the book are built on it: add chopped parsley, capers, boiled onion, or picked shellfish and you have a different dish. The note that milk "makes it look much whiter and more delicate" reflects a Victorian preoccupation with pale, refined-looking sauces on the table; the average cost of 3d. is the kind of household accounting that made the book a manual for mistresses as much as for cooks.