White Sauce
Put two tablespoons of butter in saucepan, stir until bubbling, add two tablespoons of flour, one-half teaspoon of salt and a little pepper. Stir thoroughly until blended. Pour on gradually two cups of warm milk, adding about one-third at a time, beating constantly until smooth and creamy. Most of the white sauces are simply variations of this recipe. A greater or less proportion of flour may be used according to the thickness of sauce desired.
This is the standard medium béchamel in its plainest form: equal parts butter and flour by volume, two cups of milk, cooked in one pan. A few points make the difference between a clean sauce and a pasty one.
- Cook the roux, but keep it paleThe recipe has you stir the butter until bubbling, then the flour until thoroughly blended: long enough to lose the raw-flour taste, not long enough to colour. If it takes on any tan the sauce will read as beige rather than white.
- Warm milk is not optionalThe recipe specifies warm milk and adds it in thirds for a reason: cold liquid seizes the roux into lumps. Scald or simply heat the milk while the butter melts, and beat each addition smooth before the next.
- Proportions and thicknessTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of milk works out to one tablespoon each per cup, the thin proportion used for soups and for pouring over vegetables. Two tablespoons each per cup gives a medium sauce; three to four tablespoons each per cup makes a binding sauce stiff enough for croquettes or a souffle base. The recipe itself allows for this: "a greater or less proportion of flour may be used according to the thickness of sauce desired."
- Simmer after it thickensThe original stops at "smooth and creamy." Give it three to five more minutes at a bare simmer, stirring; starch granules need that time to swell fully and the floury edge to go.
- YieldAbout two cups — enough to sauce a pound of cooked vegetables or four servings of creamed chicken or eggs.
- Holding itA skin forms within minutes. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface, or float a little melted butter on top, and reheat gently with a splash of milk.
- The variations it refers toAdd grated cheese off the heat for a cheese sauce, an onion and a bay leaf steeped in the milk for a fuller béchamel, cream and egg yolk for a rich sauce. All follow this base unchanged.
White sauce is the English-language kitchen name for béchamel, one of the sauces codified in French professional cooking in the nineteenth century and generally traced back to seventeenth-century French court cookery, though flour-thickened milk sauces long predate any single attribution. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911 it had become the workhorse of American domestic cooking — the binder for creamed vegetables, croquettes, scalloped dishes and countless "à la king" preparations that stretched small amounts of meat and fish across a family table. The note that "most of the white sauces are simply variations of this recipe" reflects the teaching method of the domestic-science movement then shaping American cookbooks: learn one proportion, then vary it, rather than memorise fifty separate sauces.