White Sauce
2 Cups Milk 2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 2 Tablespoons Butter Salt and Pepper to Taste Rub the butter and cornstarch together and add the cold milk. Place over a moderate fire and stir constantly till it boils. Cook thoroughly.
This sauce may be used for vegetables. For fish, add hard-boiled eggs, either chopped or sliced.
A cornstarch-thickened white sauce rather than a flour roux — quicker, glossier, and less forgiving of undercooking. A few notes before you start.
- Cornstarch, not flourTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to two cups of milk gives a fairly thick coating sauce, near the consistency of a thin pudding. For a pourable sauce over vegetables, one tablespoon is plenty; cornstarch has roughly twice the thickening power of flour by volume.
- Cold milk is the pointThe butter-and-starch paste is meant to meet cold milk, as the recipe specifies. Added to hot milk it lumps at once, and cornstarch lumps are harder to whisk smooth than those in a flour sauce.
- "A moderate fire"On a modern hob that is medium, not medium-high. Starch settles and can catch on the pan bottom, which is why the recipe says stir constantly; a flat-edged wooden spatula reaches the corners better than a whisk.
- "Cook thoroughly" means about a minute"Cook thoroughly" -- Cornstarch begins thickening well below boiling and reaches close to full strength around the boil. A minute or so at a bare simmer clears the raw starch taste; very prolonged boiling and stirring can thin the sauce again as the starch breaks down.
- Season at the endSalt and pepper go in after thickening. White pepper keeps the sauce unspeckled, though the recipe does not specify which pepper.
- The fish versionTwo hard-boiled eggs suit this quantity, though the recipe gives no number. Fold them in off the heat so the whites do not toughen and the yolks do not muddy the sauce.
- Yield and holdingMakes about two cups, enough for four to six servings of vegetables. A cornstarch sauce sets firm as it cools and turns slightly gluey on reheating, so make it close to serving; press a butter wrapper or damp paper onto the surface if it must wait, to stop a skin forming.
White sauce is the plainest relative of French b tsubstitute