Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › How to Make Sauces (Let hunger move thy appetyte)
How to Make Sauces (Let hunger move thy appetyte)
Let hunger move thy appetyte, and not savory sauces. - Babees Book. "Change is the sauce that sharpens appetite."
As so many dishes are prepared in the chafingdish that require the use of a simple sauce, we give in this place the methods usually followed in the preparation of common sauces. For one cup of sauce, put two tablespoonfuls of butter into the blazer; let the butter simply melt, without coloring, if for a white sauce, but cook until brown for a brown sauce. Mix together two tablespoon-
This is the standard butter-and-flour sauce base, given in chafing-dish proportions. The text breaks off mid-instruction, but the formula it is heading toward is fixed and easily completed: equal parts butter and flour, one cup of liquid.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the hot-water bath beneath it is the bain-marie or "hot-water pan." Any small heavy saucepan stands in for it, though the chafing dish's virtue was cooking at the table.
- The proportionsThe text breaks off before the second ingredient is named, but the usual chafing-dish formula is two tablespoons butter to two of flour for one cup of sauce, giving a medium sauce that will coat a spoon. Halve the flour for a thin sauce to pour, double it for a binding sauce to hold croquettes or creamed oysters together.
- White versus brownThe only difference at this stage is how long the butter and flour cook. For white sauce, melt the butter and cook the flour in it about two minutes without letting it take color; for brown, keep it moving until it smells of toasted nuts and turns the shade of a hazelnut shell. Brown flour thickens noticeably less, so allow a little more of it.
- LumpsThe hinge of the whole thing is the liquid going in gradually while you whisk. Add the first quarter cup and work it to a smooth paste before the rest follows; dumping in a full cup at once guarantees lumps that no amount of beating will fully clear.
- LiquidPeriod practice was milk or cream for white sauce, meat or fish stock for brown. Warm liquid incorporates more easily than cold, but either works if it is added in stages.
- Cook it outSimmer at least two or three minutes after it thickens. A sauce pulled off the heat the instant it comes together tastes of raw flour.
- SeasoningSalt and white pepper, and often a grating of nutmeg or a squeeze of lemon at the end, would be usual for a sauce of this kind, though the text breaks off before seasoning is reached. Season after thickening, since the sauce reduces and concentrates as it cooks.
- YieldOne cup, enough to dress a chafing dish of creamed fish, sweetbreads or vegetables.
The epigraph comes from The Babees Book, a fifteenth-century English verse manual of manners for young gentlemen, and its sentiment — that appetite, not sauce, should drive eating — recurs in Victorian and Edwardian writing that gestured at restraint before handing over a page of rich recipes. The sauce itself is the roux-thickened base that French cookery codified from the seventeenth century onward and that American cookbook writers absorbed, generally as "white sauce" and "brown sauce" rather than the French béchamel and espagnole. Its appearance in a chafing-dish chapter reflects the fashion of the 1890s and 1900s for cooking at table: the chafing dish let a hostess without a servant produce creamed lobster or curried eggs in front of guests, and many of those dishes begin with a cup of sauce like this one.