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Drawn-Butter Sauce
Put in a saucepan a couple of ounces of butter, adding two tablespoonfuls of flour while stirring; pour in a pint of water, adding a little salt and pepper. Simmer at the side of the stove for half an hour until it thickens, then add gradually half an ounce of butter, beating until it becomes white, and squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Stir well, strain through a hair-sieve, and serve.
A plain white sauce made with water rather than milk, finished with cold butter and lemon. It is the standard nineteenth-century accompaniment to boiled fish and vegetables, and it stands or falls on the finishing butter.
- The hinge: mount the butter off the heatThe final half-ounce of butter is what makes the sauce "white". The recipe does not say so, but it works best beaten in cold, in small pieces, so it emulsifies rather than melts to oil. Pull the pan off the burner before you start, and do not let the sauce boil again afterwards or it may separate.
- "At the side of the stove"On a coal range the cooler edge of the top held a pan at a bare simmer. On a gas or electric hob that is your lowest setting, or a heat diffuser. Half an hour at a real simmer will reduce a pint of water considerably; keep it barely trembling.
- QuantitiesTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons, and a pint here is presumably the American 16 fl oz. Two tablespoons of flour is only about half an ounce, so the butter far outweighs the flour — and half an ounce of flour to a pint makes a fairly loose sauce, which is why the long simmer matters.
- Cook the roux firstThe recipe has you add the water almost immediately. Give the butter and flour a minute or two of gentle cooking before the liquid goes in, or the sauce will taste raw and pasty even after thirty minutes.
- Hair sieveA woven horsehair sieve. It is often said that hair was preferred because metal mesh discoloured acidic and delicate mixtures. A fine nylon or stainless conical strainer does the job now.
- The lemonA whole lemon into a pint is assertive. Add half, taste, then decide — and add it at the very end, after the butter, as the recipe directs.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside poached fish, asparagus or boiled cauliflower. It does not reheat well; make it as the fish comes out of the pan.
Drawn butter is one of the oldest sauces in English-language cookery, and the name is a source of long-running confusion: in older usage "drawn" is generally said to have meant melted or clarified, and in much of America today drawn butter still means simply melted butter for lobster. But in nineteenth-century household books — and here in Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen — it had come to mean this thickened, flour-bound sauce, essentially a velouté made with water rather than stock. Its ubiquity says a good deal about the period's table: boiled fish, boiled vegetables and boiled fowl all wanted a bland, pale, faintly acid coating, and this was the cheapest one that could be produced in quantity. Badly made drawn butter — greasy, floury, undercooked — was the ruin of otherwise decent fish, and Oscar specifies the long simmer and the beating in of cold butter at the end.