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How to Make Sauces (Fuls of flour one-fourth)
fuls of flour, one-fourth a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of black or white pepper, or a few grains of cayenne or paprica, and beat it into the bubbling butter; let the mixture cook two or three minutes, then stir into it, rather gradually at first, and beating constantly, one cup of cold milk, water or stock. Now, when the sauce boils up once after all the liquid is in, it is ready for use. In making a white sauce some cooks add, from time to time while the sauce is being stirred, a few drops of lemon juice, which they claim makes the sauce much whiter.
Sometimes we make the sauce after another fashion, using the same proportions of the various ingredients. If water or stock be used, put it in the blazer directly over the fire. If the liquid be milk, put it into the blazer, and the blazer over hot water; cream together the butter, flour and seasonings, dilute with a little of the hot liquid, pour into the remainder of the hot liquid, and stir constantly until the sauce thickens, and then occasionally for ten or fifteen minutes, until the flour is thoroughly cooked.
In making a brown sauce, first brown the butter, then brown the flour in the butter, and, whenever it is convenient, use brown stock as the liquid.
This is the standard butter-flour-liquid sauce, written for the chafing dish rather than the stove. The text begins mid-sentence; the missing opening called for butter melted in the blazer, and the proportions that follow imply about two tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of liquid.
- The blazer and the hot-water panA chafing dish has two vessels: the blazer, which sits directly over the flame, and the hot-water pan beneath it. "Blazer over hot water" means a double boiler; use a heatproof bowl or saucepan over simmering water. Any small heavy saucepan works for the direct-heat version.
- ProportionsThe text as printed gives only one-fourth teaspoonful of salt, pepper to taste and one cup of liquid; the butter and flour quantities fall in the missing opening lines. Two tablespoons of each to a cup of liquid is the usual figure, and gives a medium sauce — pourable, coating a spoon. Half the butter and flour for a thin sauce, double for a binding sauce for croquettes.
- Cook the roux, but do not colour itThe two or three minutes of bubbling is the whole point of the first method: it cooks out the raw-flour taste. For a white sauce keep the heat low enough that the mixture stays pale and smells of biscuit, not toast.
- Cold liquid into hot rouxThe instruction to add cold milk gradually while beating is sound and worth following. Adding the liquid a little at a time with constant motion keeps the flour dispersed; tipping it in all at once is a common cause of lumps.
- The second method is beurre mani",The second method is close to beurre manie -- Creaming raw butter, flour and seasonings together and then working the paste into hot liquid is much the same as what a French kitchen calls beurre manie, though that term is usually applied to thickening a liquid at the end of cooking. The author's further ten or fifteen minutes over heat is there to cook the flour thoroughly, as the text says.
- The lemon juiceA few drops are unlikely to make much difference to the colour; the recipe reports it only as something 'some cooks' claim. Acid does slightly weaken a flour-thickened sauce, so add it at the end and for flavour.
- Brown sauceBrowning the butter and then the flour in it takes several minutes of steady stirring; the recipe gives no time for this step. A roux's thickening power drops as it darkens, so a brown sauce made this way will be looser than the white at the same proportions.
- YieldOne cup, enough to sauce four servings of vegetables, eggs or creamed fish. It thickens as it cools; thin with a little more hot liquid rather than reheating hard.
The chafing dish had a vogue in American households from the 1890s into the 1910s, and Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs squarely to it: an alcohol-lamp burner and a two-part pan let a hostess cook creamed oysters, lobster Newburg or Welsh rarebit at the table, without a servant and without a kitchen. That is why a book of dainties pauses to teach plain white sauce first: many dishes of the period were some form of creamed thing, and the sauce was a technique much of the repertoire rested on. The butter-flour-milk formula was already old by then; it descends from the French roux-thickened sauces that were in print at least as early as La Varenne in 1651, and it entered American domestic-science teaching as "white sauce" through schools like the Boston Cooking School, with which Hill is generally associated before her editorship of the Boston Cooking School Magazine.