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Ingredients for One Pint of Sauce
¼ a cup of butter. ¼ a cup of flour. 1/2 a teaspoonful of salt. ¼ a teaspoonful of pepper.
1 pint of liquid.
This is a proportion formula rather than a set of steps — the master ratio for the white sauce that binds most of the creamed oysters, lobster Newburgs and chafing-dish rarebits in this section.
- The garbled fractionsThe "14" in the scanned text is 1/4: a quarter cup of butter, a quarter cup of flour, and a quarter teaspoon of pepper. Read alongside the half teaspoon of salt, the proportions are the standard equal-parts roux.
- What the ratio gives youA quarter cup each of butter and flour (about 2 oz butter, 1 oz flour) to a pint of liquid is a medium sauce — thick enough to coat oysters or chicken without setting into paste. Halve the butter and flour for a pouring sauce, double them for a binder in croquettes.
- "One pint of liquid"Deliberately open. Milk gives a plain white sauce, cream a richer one, and the strained liquor from oysters, fish or poultry gives the savory version these chafing-dish recipes usually want. Two cups either way.
- Method, since none is givenMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a full two minutes over low heat so the sauce does not taste raw, then add the liquid gradually off the fire and return it to thicken. Adding cold liquid all at once to a hot roux is what produces lumps.
- Chafing-dish heatA spirit lamp under a bare blazer scorches flour sauces fast. Make the sauce in the hot-water pan if the dish has one, or over the lowest flame you can hold, stirring the whole time.
- PepperA quarter teaspoon of black pepper will speckle a white sauce; the recipe does not say which pepper, and white pepper is the usual choice for anything meant to look pale.
- YieldOne pint of sauce, the amount the book assumes when it refers back to this ratio; enough to dress a dish of oysters, shellfish or diced cooked chicken.
Proportion tables like this one belong to the cooking-school era, when American instruction shifted from "butter the size of an egg" to measured cups and level spoonfuls, and when a pupil was expected to learn one master sauce and vary it endlessly. Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties came out of that Boston world at the end of the 1890s, when the chafing dish was at the height of its popularity as equipment for late suppers, bachelor rooms and hostesses cooking at the table rather than in the kitchen. A great deal of the chafing-dish repertoire — creamed oysters, lobster in cream, deviled crab, chicken à la king — is this pint of sauce with something folded into it, alongside the rarebits, eggs and quick sautés the pan also handled, which is why the book sets the ratio down once and then refers back to it.