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Thin White Sauce
1 tablespoon flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon fat ⅛ teaspoon pepper 1 cup milk
This is a proportion formula rather than a set of directions — the book expects you to know the roux method and gives only the ratio that makes a sauce thin. One tablespoon of flour to one cup of milk is the standard "thin" white sauce; medium uses two tablespoons, thick three to four.
- The method the list assumesMelt the fat, stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two over low heat without letting it color, then add the milk gradually, whisking. Simmer two to three minutes after it thickens so the sauce loses its raw-flour taste.
- The hingeAdd the milk in stages to a smooth paste, or add it all at once and whisk hard. What causes lumps is dumping half the milk into a hot roux and stirring lazily; the flour seizes into knots that will not break up later.
- "Fat"The range of 1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon lets the cook decide how much fat to spend; the book says only "fat," so butter or a drippings-type fat would both fit. Butter at the full tablespoon gives the best sauce; less fat still thickens but tastes thin and pasty.
- Yield and consistencyMakes about 1 cup. Thin white sauce should coat a spoon barely, running off in a sheet rather than mounding. It is a base, not a finished coating sauce.
- What it is forAt this thickness it is meant for creamed fish or vegetables, for scalloped dishes, and as the liquid body of cream soups. For a sauce that sits on top of poached fish or covers croquettes, go to the medium proportion.
- SeasoningA quarter teaspoon of salt and an eighth of pepper per cup is a light, conventional seasoning; taste and adjust after the sauce has thickened. White pepper if you object to black specks.
- MilkThe book's "milk" would have meant whole milk. Skim milk tends to give a thinner, chalkier sauce at this low proportion of fat and flour.
White sauce is the household-manual descendant of French sauce béchamel, stripped of its veal stock, onion and long simmering and reduced to a memorizable ratio of flour to milk. American cookery schools of the late nineteenth century — the Boston Cooking School, founded in 1879 and led first by Mary Lincoln, chief among them — taught it as a table of thin, medium and thick proportions precisely so that a cook could produce creamed oysters, scalloped potatoes, croquette binding and cream soup from one lesson; Fannie Farmer, who became principal later, popularised that table in her 1896 book. This entry carries no instructions, though its directions may simply have been printed elsewhere. The flexible "1 teaspoon to 1 tablespoon fat" is a period tell, from an era when butter was a cost to be weighed against results.