Butter, Melted
INGREDIENTS.lb. of butter, a dessertspoonful of flour, 1 wineglassful of water, salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 4d. 1/4 lb. of butter, a dessertspoonful of flour, 1 wineglassful of water, salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 4 1/2d. (more economical) 2 oz. of butter, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, salt to taste, 1/2 pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 2d. (The French Sauce Blanche.) 1/4 lb. of fresh butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, salt to taste, gill of water, spoonful of white vinegar, a very little grated nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 3d.
Cut the butter up into small pieces, put it into a saucepan, dredge over the flour, and add the water and a seasoning of salt; stir it one way constantly till the whole of the ingredients are melted and thoroughly blended. Let it just boil, when it is ready .
Let it just boil, when it is ready to serve. If the butter is to be melted with cream, use the same quantity as of water, but omit the flour; keep stirring it but do not allow it to boil.
TIME.-¼ minute to simmer.
Butter, Melted (more economical). -INGREDIENTS.-2 oz. of butter, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, salt to taste, 1/2 pint of water. AVERAGE COST, 2d.
Mix the flour and waterto asmooth batter, which put into a saucepan. Add the butter and a seasoning of salt, keep stirring one way till all the ingredients are melted and perfectly smooth; let the whole boil for a minute or two, and serve.
TIME.-2 minutes to simmer.
Butter, Melted. (The French Sauce Blanche.) INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of fresh butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, salt to taste, 1/2 gill of water, 1/2 spoonful of white vinegar, a very little grated nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 3d.
Mix the flour and water to a smooth batter, carefully rubbing down with the back of a spoon any lumps that may appear. Put it in a saucepan with all the other ingredients, and let it thicken on the fire, but do not allow it to boil, lest it should taste of the flour.
TIME.-1 minute to simmer.
Three versions of the same English sauce, the plain butter sauce that once accompanied nearly every boiled fish, vegetable and pudding in a British kitchen. It is a flour-thickened emulsion, not a beurre blanc, and it wants constant stirring and the barest suggestion of heat.
- The hinge: do not let it breakThe flour is there to hold the butter and water together. Stir steadily over gentle heat and stop the moment it thickens and gloss appears; hard boiling, or heat applied too fast, will split it into oily butter and cloudy water.
- Quantities as printedThe butter weight in the first version and the water in the French version have lost their fractions in this text and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Working from the second, economical version -- 2 oz butter, 1 dessertspoonful flour, 1/2 pint water -- gives a sound ratio to build on.
- Archaic measuresA gill is 5 fl oz in British measure, half a cup plus a little. A wineglassful is about 2 fl oz. A dessertspoonful sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, roughly 2 teaspoons. An Imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz.
- "Stir it one way"The instruction to stir in one direction recurs throughout Victorian cookery writing, the reasoning usually offered being that changing direction would make a sauce curdle. It does not, but the underlying instruction -- keep it moving without pause -- is sound and worth following.
- The cream variationSubstituting cream for water and dropping the flour gives a richer, looser sauce with nothing but the cream itself to carry it. It genuinely must not boil, as the recipe warns.
- Cost notesThe prices in pence are Victorian figures included for the household accounts of the day. As printed they make the first version the dearest at 4d, the economical one the cheapest at 2d and the sauce blanche 3d, and they are of no use as a shopping guide.
- Yield and servingThe economical version makes roughly half a pint of sauce, enough for four with boiled fish, cauliflower, asparagus or a plain steamed pudding. Serve it hot from a warmed jug; it will not sit and will not reheat gracefully.
- Seasoning the third versionWhite vinegar and a scrape of nutmeg turn plain melted butter into something closer to a caper-sauce base. Add the vinegar off the heat and taste as you go, since a spoonful is a generous amount against a small volume of sauce.
Melted butter was the workhorse sauce of the English kitchen for well over two centuries, so ubiquitous that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers often simply called it "butter" and assumed the reader knew a flour-bound emulsion was meant. The quip that England possessed only one sauce, and that it was melted butter, was long in circulation, though it is repeated more often than it is sourced. Mrs Beeton's book, first published in 1861 and reissued and expanded for decades afterwards, offers a plain version, a cheaper version for economical households, and then a third dressed up with vinegar and nutmeg and labelled sauce blanche. The white sauce that eventually displaced it in British kitchens is the roux-based bechamel, in which the flour is cooked in the fat before the liquid goes in -- precisely the step the third recipe here tries to work around by warning the cook not to boil the sauce "lest it should taste of the flour".