Brown Sauce
1 tablespoon butter or fat 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup stock Salt and pepper Brown the flour in the butter, stirring it until smooth; then add the seasoning and the stock, stirring constantly to prevent lumps. If the sauce is to be served with a roast, use a little of the fat in which the meat was roasted instead of the butter and make the sauce in the roasting pan. For those who like the flavor of onion it is a good plan to roast an onion with the meat, adding it to the sauce.
Onion juice, Worcestershire sauce, tomato catsup or mushroom catsup may be added as flavoring if desired.
A one-to-one brown roux thinned with stock — the plainest form of what French kitchens call sauce espagnole, reduced to household scale. The whole dish turns on how far you take the flour.
- The hinge: browning the flourCook the flour and fat over medium-low heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and turns the colour of a walnut shell — five to eight minutes. Browned flour loses much of its thickening power, so a roux taken dark gives a thinner, deeper-tasting sauce; stop at pale tan if you want it to coat a spoon.
- YieldOne cup, enough for four modest servings. The proportion is easily doubled, but brown the roux in a wide pan so it colours evenly.
- StockThe recipe calls simply for stock, presumably a brown meat stock. Commercial broth is thinner and already salty — season at the end rather than at the roux stage as written.
- Preventing lumpsAdding cool stock to hot roux, off the heat and in a slow stream, works more reliably than pouring it in all at once. Return to the heat and simmer three to five minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Making it in the roasting panPour off all but a tablespoon of fat, leaving the browned drippings, and set the pan over a burner. Scrape the fond up as the roux forms — that is where most of the flavour is.
- Mushroom catsupThe mushroom ketchup called for here is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, not the sweet tomato condiment. It still exists from British specialty makers; a dash of soy sauce or a spoonful of mushroom soaking liquid stands in for the same savoury note.
- The roasted onionAn onion roasted alongside the meat goes soft and sweet. Mash it into the finished sauce and strain, or leave it in for a rustic texture.
Brown sauce is the household descendant of the French espagnole, one of the grand sauces codified in nineteenth-century professional kitchens, where it involved brown stock, mirepoix and hours of reduction. Cookbooks of Mrs. Fryer's generation stripped it back to fat, flour and stock, a formula a home cook could manage between taking the roast out and getting it to the table. The list of optional flavourings — Worcestershire, tomato catsup, mushroom catsup — is a snapshot of what stood in an American pantry once bottled sauces had become cheap and widely available.