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Drawn Butter Sauce
1/3 cup butter 3 tablespoons flour 1½ cups hot water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Melt one-half the butter, add flour with seasonings, and pour on gradually hot water. Boil five minutes, and add remaining butter in small pieces. To be served with boiled or baked fish.
A butter-enriched white sauce made with water rather than milk, intended to be spooned over poached or baked fish. It is simple, and the only real skill is in the finish.
- The hinge: the final butterThe remaining butter goes in in small pieces at the end. The recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat, but working off the heat and swirling rather than stirring hard helps: if the sauce boils again after the butter is in, it can separate and give a greasy film instead of a glossy sauce.
- Quantities in modern terms1/3 cup butter is about 75 g, which the recipe splits evenly: roughly 38 g for the roux and 38 g to finish. Three tablespoons of flour is about 24 g. The result is roughly 1½ cups, enough for four to six servings of fish.
- Hot water, added graduallyWarm liquid poured in slowly onto the cooked roux is the whole method for a lump-free sauce. Fish poaching liquid or a light fish stock in place of plain water gives far more flavour and is a standard substitution.
- "Boil five minutes"The long cooking drives off the raw flour taste and lets the sauce thicken fully. A flour sauce this thick scorches on the bottom easily, so keep a whisk in hand.
- Butter was salted, and unstandardisedButter of the period was commonly salted and varied in saltiness. Season at the end and taste, especially if you have used a salted stock.
- PepperThe recipe does not say which. White pepper would keep the sauce pale; black pepper works but will speck it.
- ServingMake it just before serving and keep it warm over hot, not boiling, water. It thickens as it stands and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot water or stock.
"Drawn butter" is an old English and American term for melted butter thickened into a sauce, and it was for generations the default accompaniment to boiled fish, asparagus and boiled puddings in English-speaking kitchens. Its ancestor is the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "butter sauce" or "melted butter," which cooks bound with flour to keep it from splitting. Fannie Farmer's version belongs to the great flour-sauce family that organises this whole section of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: the same roux logic scaled up or down produces thin, medium and thick white sauces, and drawn butter is simply the water-based, butter-heavy branch of it. The recipe also reflects a period habit of poaching or baking fish plainly and letting a sauce do the seasoning.