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Drawn-Butter Sauce
Two tablespoons of flour; one-half cup of butter; one pint of boiling water; one-half teaspoon of salt. Mix the butter and flour together until light and creamy, and then gradually add the boiling water, stirring constantly. Place the bowl in a saucepan containing boiling water, and stir well until the sauce comes to the boiling point. It should not be allowed to boil, but should be kept at the boiling point until it is thick enough, and then removed at once. Add the salt, and serve. A tablespoon of lemon juice or of chopped parsley will give the sauce an agreeable flavor.
A thickened melted-butter sauce of the sort that once accompanied nearly every boiled fish and plate of asparagus. It is simple, but the temperature instruction is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: hold it below a boilThe butter and flour are creamed raw, so the sauce needs sustained heat to thicken and to lose the raw-flour taste, but a hard boil will break the emulsion and leave a greasy film. The bowl set over boiling water is a double boiler; keep the sauce just short of a boil, stirring, until it coats the spoon, then pull it off.
- Beurre mani cWorking soft butter into raw flour and then whisking it into hot liquid is the technique now called beurre mani c. The butter must be genuinely soft, not melted, or the flour will not disperse and you will get lumps.
- ProportionsHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz, or one American stick. Two tablespoons of flour to a pint of water gives a deliberately light sauce, thinner than a modern b chamel; if you want it to cling to fish, use three tablespoons.
- Salt last, and tasteThe salt goes in at the end, and since butter varies in how heavily it is salted, taste before adding. Half a teaspoon suits unsalted butter; start with a quarter if yours is salted.
- If it lumps or separatesPush it through a fine sieve while hot for lumps. If it breaks, whisk in a tablespoon of cold water off the heat rather than returning it to the stove.
- Yield and servingRoughly two and a half cups before any reduction. It was meant for boiled or poached fish, lobster, asparagus, cauliflower and boiled fowl.
- Make it close to the tableThere is nothing to hold this sauce together but starch and heat. It will thin and weep if kept warm for long, so make it shortly before serving and keep it over the hot water, off direct heat.
"Drawn butter" is the American name for what English cookbooks called simply "melted butter," served over fish, boiled vegetables and boiled meats, and it was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking. The word "drawn" appears to refer to butter drawn or melted down over gentle heat rather than clarified. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book, drawn butter had passed into the vocabulary of the domestic-science movement, which liked it precisely because it demonstrated a principle: fat, starch and liquid held in suspension by controlled heat, with the whole lesson resting on the instruction not to let it boil. The lemon juice and parsley at the end mark the point where the plain sauce begins turning into the more elaborate flavored butters of the same period.