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Laboratory Exercises (Thin White Sauce T flour T)
1 Thin White Sauce. 1½ T. flour 1½ T. butter Medium White Sauce. 2 T. flour 2 T. butter 1/4 t. salt 1 C. milk + t. salt 1 C. milk
This is a proportion table rather than a method — the kind of thing a domestic-science student was expected to memorize and then execute from a demonstration. The ratios still hold exactly.
- Reading the abbreviationsT. is a tablespoon, t. a teaspoon, C. a cup of 8 fluid ounces, measured level in the domestic-science convention. The thin sauce specifies 1/4 teaspoon of salt per cup of milk; the salt figure for the medium sauce has been garbled in transcription, and 1/4 teaspoon is the likeliest reading.
- The two gradesThin white sauce (1½ tablespoons each flour and butter per cup of milk) is for cream soups and thinning purées. Medium (2 tablespoons each) is the all-purpose sauce for creamed vegetables, eggs, fish and gratins. Each formula yields about one cup.
- Method the table assumesMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the paste two minutes over low heat without letting it color, then add the milk. Adding all the milk at once and whisking hard is at least as reliable as gradual addition, and faster.
- The hingeThe sauce must reach a full boil and hold it a minute or two after thickening. Starch that is not cooked out tastes raw and pasty, and this is the single fault that separates a good white sauce from a school-cafeteria one.
- Heat and vesselA heavy-bottomed saucepan and a flat whisk; milk sauces scorch on thin metal and the burnt taste cannot be stirred out. A double boiler is unnecessary if the heat is moderate and the whisk keeps moving.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt per cup is a starting point only. White pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are conventional additions, which the table omits.
- Holding itA skin forms within minutes. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface, or float a spoonful of milk on top and whisk it in before serving.
White sauce earned its place at the front of American cooking-school syllabuses because it teaches starch thickening, emulsion and heat control in one five-minute exercise, and because a graded set of proportions could be written on a blackboard and drilled. The scheme of thin, medium and thick sauces built from equal parts butter and flour per cup of milk is generally traced to Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School, and it spread through the household-arts textbooks that followed as a kind of standard measure hen the dozens of dishes (creamed chicken, scalloped potatoes, croquettes, cream soups) that were simply this sauce plus something else. The insistence on level tablespoons and a defined cup reflects the era's larger project: replacing the older "butter the size of an egg" with numbers a whole class could reproduce identically.