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Creamed Dishes (Thick White Sauce T flour T)
1/2 t. salt Thick White Sauce. 4 T. flour 2 T. butter 1 C. milk t. salt Note. In making a large quantity of sauce, the amount of butter may be reduced. Methods of Mixing.
Method No. I. (American) 1. Melt butter in sauce pan, being careful not to scorch it. 2. Add flour and salt and stir until smooth. 3. Place on fire and let it cook until it bubbles. 4. Add milk gradually and let it boil two minutes, stirring constantly. If too thick, add more milk.
Method No. II. (Invalid Cooking) 1. Mix flour and salt with a little cold milk. When smooth, add to the rest of the milk, place over hot water and cook thirty minutes, stirring frequently to prevent lumping. 2. Add butter and stir until melted.
Method No. III. (French) Uses. 1. Rub flour, salt and butter to a paste. 2. Let it cook until it bubbles, then add milk gradually. 3. Boil two minutes, stirring constantly.
Thin white sauce is used for thickening soups, for moistening escalloped dishes and for cream toast. Medium white sauce is best as dressing for warmed-over cooked meat and for cooked vegetables.
Thick white sauce forms the foundation of croquettes and souffles.
Tomato sauce may be made by Method No. I, substituting stewed and strained tomato for the milk.
For brown sauce, brown the butter and flour, increase the amount of flour to 3 T. to 1 C. liquid and use meat stock instead of milk.
Cream Toast. 3 T. flour 3 T. butter t. salt 2 C. milk 6 slices of toast 1. Make white sauce by one of the above methods. 2. Cut stale bread in 4-inch slices. 3. Put slices into wire toaster or on broiler and hold over fire. 4. Hold far enough from the fire so that they will dry thoroughly before they begin to brown. Then hold nearer the fire until they are a deep golden brown. 5. Dip each slice of toast into the white sauce, place on serving dish and pour remaining sauce over all. 6. Serve hot.
Creamed Cabbage. 1 small head of cabbage 14 C. medium white sauce. 1. Have water boiling. 2. Take off outside leaves of cabbage. 3. Cut cabbage in quarters and remove core. 4. Separate leaves of cabbage, wash and drop a leaf at a time into the boiling water. 5. Boil fifteen minutes, drain off water and cover again with boiling water and boil until tender. 6. Drain off water and reheat in 1½ C. medium white sauce. Creamed Turnips. 3 C. turnips cut in cubes 1 C. medium white sauce. 1. Wash and pare turnips and cut in 1-inch cubes. 2. Drop into boiling water, boil ten minutes, drain and cover again with boiling salted water. 3. Cook until tender, then drain and reheat in white sauce. Creamed Peas. 2 C. shelled peas C. medium white sauce. 1. Wash and shell peas and put on to cook in small quantity of boiling water. 2. Salt when half done. 3. When tender, drain and reheat in white sauce.
Note. A teaspoonful of sugar may be added to the water in which the peas are cooked.
Canned peas may be drained, rinsed, reheated in small quantity of boiling water, drained again and added to white sauce. Be sure to drain and rinse the canned peas to get rid of any chemical preservative that may have been used.
Creamed Dried Beef. 1/4 lb. sliced dried beef 1 C. medium white sauce. 1. Separate the meat into inch pieces and cover with hot water. 2. Let stand two minutes and drain. 3. Just before serving add to white sauce. If allowed to stand in the white sauce for any length of time it may cause it to curdle.
Creamed Salt Codfish. 1 C. codfish 1 C. medium white sauce 1. Pull codfish into shreds. 2. Cover with hot water and let stand ten minutes. 3. Drain, add to white sauce and reheat. 4. Garnish with hard boiled eggs and serve with potatoes boiled in the jackets. One tablespoonful of flour may be omitted and a well beaten egg stirred into the sauce just before serving.
This is a domestic-science lesson in one ratio: fat, flour and milk in proportions you scale up or down. Once the thick sauce is understood, the rest of the page is just applications.
- The abbreviationsT. is tablespoon, C. is cup, t. is teaspoon. A fraction has dropped out before "t. salt" in several places; comparable white sauces of the period call for something between ¼ and ½ teaspoon per cup of milk.
- Missing fractionsCreamed cabbage reads "14 C." of sauce but step 6 gives 1½ cups, which is right. The peas call for an unstated quantity — use about 1 cup of medium sauce to 2 cups of peas. Cream toast's "4-inch slices" of bread should read ¼-inch.
- Thin, medium, thickThis page prints only the thick version (4 T flour to 1 cup milk). Thin is usually given as 1 tablespoon flour per cup, medium as 2. Butter varies: the thick sauce here uses half as much butter as flour, the cream toast equal amounts, and the note allows less in large batches.
- The hinge: cook the rouxLetting the butter and flour bubble before the milk goes in is what removes the raw-starch taste. Two minutes of gentle bubbling is enough; keep the heat low so the butter does not brown unless you want the brown sauce variation.
- Adding milkGradually means a splash at a time at first, whisked smooth, then in a stream. Cold milk into a hot roux works fine with a whisk; the recipe's "boil two minutes" is the point at which the starch fully thickens.
- Method II and "invalid cooking"Invalid cookery meant food for the sick. Thirty minutes over hot water with no browned roux gave a bland, very digestible sauce. It is a slow method with no flavour advantage for a well person.
- Cabbage and turnipsThe two-water treatment — boil, drain, cover with fresh boiling water, boil again — was meant to tame sulphurous smells. Modern practice is one pot of salted water and much shorter cooking: 6-8 minutes for cabbage leaves, 10-12 for turnip cubes, so they arrive at the sauce still firm.
- Dried beef and salt codBoth are salt-cured. The hot-water soak draws off salt, and the warning about curdling is real: the salt in cured meat will break a milk sauce if it sits. Combine at the last moment and do not hold it on heat. Salt cod may need longer soaking than ten minutes depending on how hard it is.
- The preservative note on canned peasWritten when canned goods could carry undisclosed preservatives. Draining and rinsing modern canned peas is still worth doing, for the tinny packing liquid rather than for chemicals.
- The egg finishDropping one tablespoon of flour and whisking in a beaten egg turns the codfish sauce into a light custard-bound one. Add it off the heat and warm it gently afterwards, or it will scramble.
White sauce entered American home cooking through the domestic-science movement of the 1880s-1910s, which took the French béchamel and rewrote it as an arithmetic problem: one, two or four tablespoons of flour to a cup of milk, according to whether you wanted to moisten, to dress, or to bind. Teaching cooks a single ratio with three thicknesses and a dozen applications was exactly the point of a students' manual — the school kitchens of the era are generally said to have drilled proportions rather than dishes. The naming of the three methods as American, invalid and French is itself period evidence: household cookery then still carried a whole branch devoted to feeding the sick at home, in what is often described as a period before hospital care became usual, and the bland flour-and-milk gruel-sauce belonged to it. The creamed dishes that follow — dried beef, salt codfish, canned peas — show the same instinct at work on the pantry, using a cheap sauce to stretch preserved protein into a hot supper.