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Brown Sauce
1 heaping tablespoon browned flour. 1 tablespoon butter. 1 pint white sauce. 1 tablespoon grated onion (or you can color and flavor white sauce with kitchen bouquet.) Put butter in spider, when melted add onion, then flour. After it is blended add white sauce, season with pepper and salt.
A milk-based brown sauce rather than the classic meat-stock espagnole — essentially white sauce given color and a little onion sweetness. A few of the assumptions behind it need spelling out.
- Browned flourRarely found on shelves today. Spread plain flour in a dry skillet or a shallow pan and toast it, stirring, until it is the color of light cocoa, then cool and store it in a jar. Toasting breaks down some of the starch's thickening power, so a tablespoon of browned flour thickens noticeably less than a tablespoon of raw flour.
- SpiderA cast-iron frying pan, originally one with legs for standing over coals. Any heavy skillet or a small saucepan works.
- White sauceA milk-based béchamel: flour and butter cooked together, then milk. One pint is 2 cups. Have it already made and warm before you start, or the sauce will go lumpy.
- The hingeKeep the heat low while the onion softens. The point of the browned flour is color you have already developed; scorching the butter or the onion in the pan gives bitterness that milk will not cover.
- Grated onionGrate on the coarse side of a box grater and use the juice along with the pulp. A tablespoon is a modest amount from a small onion.
- Kitchen BouquetThe suggested shortcut, a caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, is still made and usually shelved with the gravy mixes. A little goes a long way in a pint of sauce, and it is assertive in flavor, so add it before the final seasoning, not after.
- Yield and useMakes about 2 cups. A sauce of this kind would generally be served over meats, croquettes and reheated leftovers rather than on its own, though the recipe does not say.
- SeasoningNo quantities are given for the salt and pepper. Taste at the end; a spoonful of pan drippings or meat glaze adds the savor the milk base lacks.
Mrs. Wilson's brown sauce reflects an American household practice — one approach among several in period cookbooks, which also carried stock-based versions — of treating "brown sauce" as white sauce with color added, rather than following the French espagnole built on veal stock and long reduction: a practical substitution in a kitchen with milk on hand and no stockpot going. Browned flour was itself a pantry staple in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, toasted in quantity and kept in a tin for gravies. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and the Philadelphia press, much of it during and just after the First World War, and her instincts run consistently toward economy: one base sauce, varied by additions, and a bottled shortcut offered without apology for the cook who has no browned flour in the house.