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To Melt Butter
320. Mix in the proportion of a tea-spoonful of flour and a good pinch of salt to four ounces of the best butter, on a trencher. Put it into a small saucepan with about half a pint of hot water, boil quick a minute, shaking it all the time, and turning it always in one direction. Milk used instead of water requires rather less butter, and looks whiter.
Another Method of Melting Butter.-Mix very smoothly a large teaspoonful of flour with a tea-cup of cold water, and add a pinch of salt. Put to these, in your saucepan, two or three ounces of good fresh butter, cut in small pieces, and shake the saucepan round one way and almost without intermission till the ingredients are perfectly mixed, and it has simmered for two or three minutes.
A plainer sauce may be made by adding one-and-a-half ounce of butter to the above flour and water. And for an inexperienced person it is easier to add the butter after the flour and water have boiled for a couple of minutes, and then boil the whole for one minute more, stirring or shaking all the time.
This is the old English "melted butter" — not clarified butter but a thin flour-thickened butter sauce, the ancestor of what a French kitchen would call a beurre manié sauce. The entry gives four versions of increasing richness; the last is the one to start with.
- The hinge: constant motion, one directionThe flour is barely enough to stabilise the emulsion, so the pan must be shaken or stirred without a pause from the moment it goes on the heat. Stopping, or letting it sit off the boil, breaks the sauce into greasy flour and water. The "always in one direction" instruction is folklore, but the continuous agitation behind it is not.
- MeasuresHalf a pint imperial is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. A Victorian tea-cup is roughly a quarter pint, 5 fl oz or a scant ⅔ cup. Four ounces of butter is one US stick.
- Start with the last methodThe final variant — boil the flour and water two minutes, then add the butter and boil one minute more — is the most reliable, because the starch is already gelatinised and hydrated before the fat arrives. Use it unless you have made this sauce before.
- Butter qualityWith four ounces of butter to 10 fl oz of liquid and only a teaspoon of flour, the butter is the whole flavour. Unsalted butter and the pinch of salt as written give you control; salted butter will need the added salt cut or dropped.
- Milk versionMade with milk the sauce is whiter and slightly sweeter, and, as the text says, tolerates less butter. Watch it more closely — milk solids catch on the bottom of the pan where water will not.
- Yield and servingThe first version makes roughly 1½ cups, enough for four as a sauce for boiled fish, asparagus, cauliflower or a steamed pudding. It will not hold: serve within a few minutes of making, and do not reheat, as it separates.
- Where to take itChopped parsley, capers with a little of their vinegar, or chopped hard-boiled egg stirred in at the end turn this into the standard Victorian parsley, caper and egg sauces for fish.