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Thick White Sauce
4 to 5 tablespoons flour
¼ teaspoon salt
I to 5 tablespoons fat
⅛ teaspoon pepper
1 cup milk
This is a proportion table rather than a set of directions: the book gives thin, medium and thick white sauces as a graded series, all built the same way. At this ratio the sauce sets firm enough to bind croquettes or hold a shape when chilled.
- The hinge: cook the roux before the milkMelt the fat, stir in the flour and let it bubble a full minute or two over low heat so the starch loses its raw taste. Then add the milk and whisk constantly until it thickens, which happens quickly at this flour level.
- What "fat" meansButter, or beef drippings, lard or a vegetable shortening depending on the dish. The printed line appears to call for roughly the same volume of fat as flour, 4 to 5 tablespoons, though the figure is garbled in this copy.
- YieldAbout one cup, since almost nothing evaporates in the few minutes of cooking. That is enough to bind roughly two cups of chopped chicken, fish or vegetables for croquettes.
- Where thick sauce belongsAt four to five tablespoons of flour per cup of milk this is a binding paste, not a pouring sauce. For coating fish or creamed dishes a medium sauce (typically about two tablespoons flour per cup) is the one you want; a thin sauce typically runs about one tablespoon.
- Season at the end as wellThe quarter teaspoon salt and eighth teaspoon pepper assume the sauce disappears into a seasoned filling. If it is going to be tasted on its own, correct the seasoning after it thickens, and add a scrape of nutmeg or a little onion cooked in the fat.
- Keeping itA sauce this thick skins over and stiffens hard as it cools. Press buttered paper or plastic directly on the surface, and thin it with a spoonful of hot milk when you reheat.
Graded white sauces, thin to thick, were a fixture of American cooking-school teaching from the 1890s onward: master one ratio of fat to flour to milk and you had the basis for cream soups, creamed vegetables, scalloped dishes, croquettes and half the sauce chapter of any general cookbook. The technique is often traced to France, a béchamel stripped of its onion, clove and simmering, and it entered domestic-science curricula because it teaches starch gelatinization in a form a beginner can measure. The thick version found one of its most common uses in croquettes, which were fashionable in this period as a way to turn leftover meat and fish into something that could be shaped, crumbed and fried, and which required a binder stiff enough to slice when cold.