Cream Sauce
1 tablespoon butter. 1 tablespoon flour. 1 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Dash of red or black pepper Melt the butter, being careful not to brown it; add the flour; stir until smooth; then add the milk gradually, stirring constantly until it boils. Season and use at once.
A plain white sauce, given here in the abbreviated style of a loose-leaf card. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so a little judgment is needed before you start.
- The missing quantitiesThe instructions call for butter and flour but the printed list gives only milk, salt and pepper. The standard proportion of the period, and still the working ratio, is 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk for a medium sauce; 1 tablespoon of each gives a thin sauce for creaming vegetables, 3 to 4 a thick one for binding croquettes.
- Cook the roux, briefly"Melt the butter, being careful not to brown it" is the hinge. Let the butter and flour bubble together for a minute or two over low heat before any milk goes in; that cooks off the raw-flour taste without taking on colour. If it browns you are heading towards a brown sauce rather than a cream sauce.
- Milk temperatureAdding cold milk gradually to a hot roux works, but warm milk incorporates faster and with less risk of lumps. Add the first splash off the heat and whisk it to a paste before loosening with the rest.
- "Until it boils"Take the direction at its word and bring it right up to the boil; the flour needs that heat to thicken fully. Two or three minutes more at a bare simmer, stirring, helps cook out any pasty taste.
- Red pepper"A dash of red pepper" means cayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes. A pinch is enough; it is there for warmth, not heat.
- Use at onceThe instruction is deliberate. Standing sauce forms a skin and stiffens. If you must hold it, lay buttered paper or plastic directly on the surface and thin with a little more milk when you reheat.
- YieldAbout a cup of sauce, enough for roughly four modest servings of creamed vegetables, fish or chicken.
Cream sauce, white sauce and béchamel overlapped heavily as terms in American household cookery by the early twentieth century, though they were not strictly interchangeable — béchamel often implied added aromatics or stock — and the butter-flour-milk formula was taught as one of the first lessons in the domestic science schools that shaped books like this one. The appeal was systematic: learn one ratio, vary the thickness, and you had the base for creamed chicken, scalloped potatoes, croquettes, soufflés and a dozen cream soups. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format was built for exactly this kind of foundation recipe — a card to be pulled out and cross-referenced whenever another page said "add cream sauce." Why the ingredient list here reads as a fragment rather than a full accounting is harder to say; a truncated or mis-set list is as likely an explanation as anything.