Entrees
Put the milk on to heat. Beat the flour and butter to a cream in another saucepan and when the milk heats pour it over the mixture, put the pan over the fire and stir until the contents begin to boil; then add the other ingredients and simmer three minutes. Have the bread toasted and lay it on a hot dish. Pour the hot mixture over it and serve immediately.
This is the method half of a white-sauce-on-toast entrée; the ingredient list belonged to the headnote and is not reproduced here. What survives is a clear description of a cold-roux béchamel, which is worth reading on its own terms.
- The missing quantitiesNothing in the text gives amounts, so any figure would be invention. A common proportion for a sauce of this kind in period American manuals is about 1 tablespoon each of butter and flour to 1 cup of milk, though heavier ratios were also usual; the "other ingredients" would presumably be seasoning and whatever the dish was named for.
- Cold roux, hot milkCreaming raw flour into soft butter and then pouring scalded milk over it is the reverse of the usual order. It works, and it is nearly lump-proof, but the flour gets no cooking before the liquid arrives — so the three-minute simmer at the end is not optional. That is the hinge of the recipe: cut it short and the sauce tastes of raw paste.
- "Put the pan over the fire"Medium heat, and stir constantly with a flat-edged wooden spoon or whisk from the moment the milk goes in. The sauce thickens abruptly just below the boil.
- Scalding the milkHeating the milk -- The text asks only that the milk be hot when it goes over the butter and flour; heating it to the point where steam rises and bubbles form at the edge is enough. Boiled milk skins over and catches on the bottom of the pan.
- If the added ingredient is delicateThree minutes at a simmer suits seasonings and cooked meat. Oysters or shrimp added at that stage need barely a minute and should be stirred in off the heat, or they tighten and weep liquid into the sauce.
- Toast timingToast last, not first. It should go onto a warmed platter dry and crisp and be sauced immediately; toast held even a few minutes softens and the dish arrives soggy.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern house best known for its sewing patterns, which also published The Delineator, and it treats white sauce as a foundation rather than a recipe — varied by whatever is stirred in at the end. The technique descends from French béchamel, and by the turn of the century "creamed something on toast" had become the standard way of stretching small quantities of expensive protein across a family table. Serving it on toast rather than in a pastry case or timbale marks it as the plain end of that range: the toast is there to carry the sauce and to make a modest amount of meat or fish read as a full dish.