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Cream Sauce
Roll a lump of butter in flour, put it in a pan on the fire, and as it melts add pepper and salt. Stir it, and as it thickens add a little milk; let it simmer and keep on stirring it. You will never get a good white sauce unless you season it well and let it simmer for a quarter of an hour. Strain it, heat it again, and serve it for fish, potatoes, chicken.
Sauce Maitre d'Hotel Every one likes this sauce for either meat or fish. In a double saucepan melt a lump of butter, flavor it with salt, pepper, some minced parsley that you had first rubbed on a raw slice of onion, and some lemon-juice. Use vinegar instead of the lemon if you wish, but do not forget that it does not require so much vinegar. Mix it with a fork and serve it warm; do not let it bubble. Sauce au Diable (For cold meats) Take a shallot or two, according to quantity of sauce needed, slice very finely, shred a little parsley, put both into the sauce-boat, with salt, pepper, and mustard to taste; add oil and vinegar in proportion of one dessert-spoonful of vinegar to two table-spoonfuls of oil, till sufficient quantity.
Three sauces run together in one entry: a plain white sauce, a warm butter sauce, and a cold vinaigrette that carries the name of a much richer classical sauce. None gives quantities, so the ratios below are the standard ones.
- The proportionsA "lump of butter" rolled in flour means roughly equal measures of each: 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour will thicken 1 cup of milk to a coating consistency. Add the milk in stages, stirring, or you will be straining out lumps rather than seasoning.
- The fifteen-minute simmer is not paddingThis is the hinge of the first sauce. Raw flour tastes of paste, and only a long gentle simmer cooks it out; the modern shortcut of two minutes at a boil is what makes home white sauce taste floury. Keep the heat low and stir often, since a milk sauce catches on the bottom of the pan easily.
- "Cream Sauce" contains no creamThe name is used loosely here for what is now called béchamel or plain white sauce. A spoonful of cream stirred in at the end, off the heat, is in keeping with the period if you want it.
- StrainingWorth doing even if the sauce looks smooth: it catches skin and any seized flour. Reheat gently afterwards and cover the surface if it must stand, or it will skin over.
- Maître d'hôtel must not boilIt is butter, seasoning, parsley and acid held together by warmth, not an emulsion built on egg. A double saucepan is specified precisely because direct heat will break it into oily butter and a watery pool. The instruction "do not let it bubble" is the whole technique.
- The parsley-and-onion trickRubbing the minced parsley on a cut face of raw onion gives the faintest onion perfume without pieces of onion in the butter. It works, and it is quicker than mincing and sweating a shallot.
- Sauce au Diable here is a vinaigretteThe classical devil sauce is a reduced brown sauce with cayenne and vinegar. This one is a cold mustard dressing mixed in the sauce boat, meant to be spooned over cold roast meat, and it should be treated as such.
- Dessert-spoonfulAn intermediate British measure between teaspoon and tablespoon, about 2 teaspoons or 10 ml. The stated proportion works out at roughly one part vinegar to three parts oil.
- YieldThe white sauce as scaled above makes about a cup, enough for four servings of fish or potatoes. Both the butter sauce and the vinaigrette are made to the quantity you need and neither keeps well warm.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled by Mrs. Brian Luck and published in 1915, gathering recipes from Belgian refugees who had come to England after the German invasion of 1914; it appeared among a number of wartime cookbooks associated with Belgian relief. The vagueness of the quantities -- "a lump," "according to quantity of sauce needed" -- is characteristic of the book throughout. All three sauces belong to the French repertoire that Belgian domestic cooking shares, and the flour-and-butter white sauce in particular was a mainstay of northern European household cookery of the period, being a cheap way to make a small amount of fish or a plate of boiled potatoes into a dish.