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Cream Sauce with Vinegar
Put one tablespoonful of flour into a saucepan with one ounce of butter, and stir it over the fire until mixed, but not browned; then pour in by degrees one-half pint of cream, and continue stirring until thick and boiling. Season the sauce with salt and a little grated nutmeg; squeeze in the juice of a lemon, or a sufficient quantity of vinegar to give it a tart flavor, and then serve.
A plain white sauce built on cream rather than milk, then sharpened with acid at the last moment. The order of operations is the whole recipe.
- Acid goes in last, off the heatAcid goes in last -- The recipe adds lemon or vinegar only at the end, after the sauce has thickened. Acid stirred into cream at a full boil can cause it to separate, so it is safer to slacken the heat and add the acid a little at a time, tasting as you go.
- QuantitiesOne tablespoon flour to one ounce butter (two tablespoons) is a fat-heavy roux by later standards. Half a pint is one cup in American measure, giving roughly a cup of finished sauce, enough to dress a dish for about four.
- "Stir until mixed, but not browned"Cook the roux briefly over gentle heat, just long enough to lose the raw-flour taste, and stop before it takes any colour, as the recipe directs.
- CreamNineteenth-century cream was unstandardised and generally lighter than modern heavy cream at about 36 percent, which will thicken more than the recipe expects. Half-and-half, or heavy cream cut with milk, is likely closer to the original body.
- Pour in by degreesAdd the cream a splash at a time, working each addition smooth before the next. Warming it first helps, though with only a cup it is not essential.
- The juice of a lemon"The juice of a lemon" -- Reckon roughly two tablespoons from a small lemon. Start with one and taste; "a tart flavor" means noticeable, not aggressive. A cider or white wine vinegar will suit it better than distilled.
- NutmegGrate it fresh. Pre-ground nutmeg in a cream sauce this simple reads as dusty.
- ServingServe hot, as the recipe directs. A sauce of this kind suits boiled or poached fish, plain vegetables or boiled fowl, though the recipe names none. It thickens as it stands, so make it last and thin with a spoonful of hot cream if needed.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book ran to some nine hundred pages and included whole families of sauces in this compressed, one-paragraph style, on the assumption that a reader already knew what a roux was. This is the standard butter-flour-liquid sauce of the French kitchen, long settled cookbook doctrine by 1896, here built on cream and sharpened with acid to cut richness. That vinegar appears as an equal alternative to lemon reflects the period rather than anything particular to the Waldorf: citrus was seasonal and costly, while vinegar was a pantry staple.