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Medium White Sauce
2 to 3 tablespoons flour
¼ teaspoon salt
I to 3 tablespoons fat
⅛ teaspoon pepper
1 cup milk
This entry is a proportion table rather than a set of instructions: it gives the ratio for one cup of medium white sauce and assumes the cook already knows the roux method taught elsewhere in the book. A few notes fill in what the page leaves unsaid.
- The ranges are deliberateThe ranges are wide -- "2 to 3 tablespoons flour" and "1 to 3 tablespoons fat" cover a spread of thicknesses rather than one fixed formula. 2 tablespoons flour and 2 tablespoons fat to 1 cup milk sits in the middle of the range; the heavier end will give a stiffer sauce of the kind used to bind croquettes.
- What "fat" meansIn a household of this period the word covered butter, clarified drippings, or vegetable shortening, whichever was to hand. Butter is the usual choice for a fish or vegetable sauce; drippings suit a meat gravy and will carry that meat's flavor.
- Method the page omitsMelt the fat, stir in the flour, and cook the paste a minute or two over low heat without letting it color, then add the milk gradually off the direct heat, whisking. Return to the heat and simmer, stirring, until it thickens and no longer tastes of raw flour.
- Cooking the flour matters mostThe single thing that separates a good white sauce from a pasty one is giving the flour enough time in the fat and then enough time in the milk. A sauce pulled off the heat as soon as it thickens still tastes of starch; two or three minutes of gentle simmering fixes it.
- Warm milk, fewer lumpsAdding cold milk to a hot roux all at once can leave knots. Scalding the milk first, as a number of period cookbooks direct, makes the whole business easier and faster.
- Yield and thicknessSlightly more than 1 cup of sauce. It should coat a spoon and run off in a sheet; if it stands in a mound it is thick sauce, not medium.
- SeasoningAn eighth teaspoon of pepper to one cup is a matter of taste; adjust at the end, and use white pepper if you object to black specks.
White sauce is the English-language kitchen's domestication of French béchamel, and by the time the Butterick book appeared it had been reduced to arithmetic: American cooking schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries taught sauces as thin, medium, and thick, distinguished only by the flour and fat per cup of milk. That tabular approach is generally traced to the influence of the Boston Cooking School and its published lessons, which treated proportion as the teachable principle and method as something learned once and applied everywhere. Its appearance here, stripped to a line of figures, shows how thoroughly the technique had become assumed knowledge — the foundation for creamed dishes, scalloped dishes, croquette bindings, and the gratins that made small quantities of meat and fish stretch across a family table.