Drawn Butter
Take flour and butter in the proportion of one teaspoon of flour to two ounces of butter; mix thoroughly, put into a small saucepan with three tablespoons of hot water, boil for a minute, stirring one way constantly. Milk used instead of water requires rather less butter.
A minimal melted-butter sauce, thickened just enough to hold together. The whole thing hinges on emulsion rather than roux, so treat it as a butter sauce that happens to contain flour, not as a gravy.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons (half a stick); a teaspoon of flour against that is a token amount, barely 1/8 oz. Three tablespoons of water brings the total to a little under half a cup — enough, roughly, to sauce two servings of fish or a small dish of vegetables. Scale up by whole multiples if you need more.
- Mix cold, not hot"Mix thoroughly" is best read as working the flour into softened (not melted) butter to make a smooth paste, in the manner of the beurre manié used to thicken soups. The recipe does not say so outright, but skipping this risks floury specks that never disperse in so little liquid.
- Stir one way constantlyWhat matters is that the stirring is constant, keeping the melted butter suspended in the water rather than splitting into a greasy layer and a starchy one. The specification of a single direction is traditional kitchen lore rather than anything demonstrable. A whisk does the same job faster.
- Boil for a minute, and no longerA minute is enough to cook out the raw starch and set the thickening. Longer boiling in a pan this small drives off the water and breaks the sauce.
- Hot water, deliberatelyAdding cold water to the butter paste chills the butter into lumps and the sauce takes much longer to come together. The original specifies hot water; kettle-hot will do.
- The milk variationMilk makes a richer, opaque sauce closer to a thin béchamel; presumably its own fat is why the recipe calls for rather less butter. Watch it more carefully — milk catches on the bottom of a small pan where water will not.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives none. Drawn butter of this period was salted to taste and very often finished with lemon juice, chopped parsley, capers or a chopped hard-boiled egg, depending on what it was going over.
"Drawn" butter is old English kitchen language for butter melted into a sauce — the name is often traced to butter "drawn out" in melting, though the sense of butter drawn off or clarified is at least as commonly given — and by the eighteenth century it was a standard English accompaniment to boiled fish and plainly cooked vegetables, and was known in America as well: the base to which capers, parsley, eggs or anchovy were added to make a named sauce. Its appearance here, stripped to four lines and a proportion, is characteristic of the domestic manuals of the period, written for home managers who wanted a working formula rather than a discussion, with the sauce chapter functioning as a set of building blocks to be applied across the rest of the book.