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Cream Sauce
Put into a saucepan one ounce of flour and two ounces of butter, place it on a slow fire, and stir lightly with a spatula for two minutes, adding one wineglassful of Madeira, two ounces of caster sugar and one teacupful of cream. Stir well again for two minutes, to avoid its coming to a boil; take it from the fire, add immediately one wineglassful of wine, stirring it lightly again. Pour the cream into a saucebowl, and serve immediately.
A sweet dessert sauce rather than the savoury white sauce the name suggests today: a butter-heavy roux slackened with cream, sugar and a good deal of Madeira. The whole point is that it never boils.
- Keep it below a simmerThe instruction to stir "to avoid its coming to a boil" is the hinge of the recipe. Boiling drives off the Madeira's aroma, which is all the sauce has going for it, and a sauce this heavily buttered will break if pushed hard. Hold it just hot enough to thicken.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is generally reckoned at 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. The recipe calls for two of them, so roughly half a cup of wine in total, half cooked in and half stirred in off the heat.
- TeacupfulMuch less fixed than the wineglass: period sources put it anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces. Anything between half and three quarters of a cup of cream will work here.
- Flour and butter by weightOne ounce of flour is about a quarter cup; two ounces of butter is four tablespoons. That is twice the fat a standard equal-weight roux carries, which makes for a rich, glossy sauce, only lightly bound.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar. Ordinary granulated dissolves perfectly well in a warm sauce, so no substitution problem; caster would dissolve faster still in a mixture that must not be cooked hard.
- The two minutes of rouxOn a slow fire this only just cooks the raw taste out of the flour. Give it the full two minutes and keep the heat low enough that the butter does not colour; the sauce should stay pale.
- The second wineglassOscar does not name the wine in the final addition. Madeira is the sensible reading, and adding it off the heat keeps the fresh, slightly fiery note that the cooked portion has lost.
- Yield and serviceMakes about a cup and a half. The recipe names no dish for it; a sauce of this kind would suit steamed or boiled puddings, plain cake or fruit, and it wants to go to the table hot, as the butter dulls and separates as it cools.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf ed a proper brigade and yet the 1896 book that carries his name became one of the most complete records of what a grand American hotel actually cooked. This sauce belongs to a family of hot wine-and-cream dessert sauces that ran through nineteenth-century hotel cookery, close kin to the German Weinschaumsauce and to English wine sauces for plum pudding, though thickened with a roux rather than with egg. Madeira's prominence is itself a period marker: fortified and stable enough to survive a long sea passage, it had been a fixture of American cellars since the colonial trade, though its dominance there had been declining since mid-century. The British spelling "caster sugar" alongside the American "teacupful" is a fair picture of where hotel cooking stood: French technique, English vocabulary, American measures.