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Drawn Butter
Dissolve over a slow fire a quarter of a pound of butter, sprinkling in about a tablespoonful of flour; afterward add half a pint of boiling water and a pinch of salt. Boil for a few minutes, stirring well, and then put in a teaspoonful of cold water. If intended for a pudding sauce put in a glass of white wine and half a grated nutmeg, stirring thoroughly.
A nineteenth-century all-purpose melted butter sauce, thin by modern standards and prone to separating. The technique matters more than the proportions.
- Keep it below a boilDespite the instruction to "boil for a few minutes," a tablespoon of flour cannot hold a quarter pound of butter in suspension at a rolling boil. Hold it at a bare simmer and whisk continuously; the teaspoon of cold water at the end appears to be there to knock the temperature down and help pull a threatening sauce back together.
- MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup. A quarter pound of butter is one stick, 4 oz. A "glass" of wine in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup.
- Slow fireLow heat throughout — the butter should melt without foaming or browning, and the flour should not take on color.
- The flour is deliberately scantOne tablespoon to a cup of liquid gives a barely-bodied sauce, not a modern white sauce. If you want it to coat rather than pool, use two tablespoons and expect a different, heavier result than Oscar intended.
- Method orderThe flour goes into melted butter, not into a cooked roux, and boiling water is added rather than cold. Adding the water hot and in a stream while whisking is what keeps it from lumping.
- NutmegHalf a whole nutmeg grated into a cup of sauce is assertive by current taste. A quarter of a nutmeg, or about half a teaspoon freshly grated, reads closer to modern expectations.
- Yield and useRoughly a cup and a half (half a cup of butter to a cup of water), more with the wine added. Unsweetened, it is a standard sauce for boiled fish, asparagus and other plain vegetables; with the wine and nutmeg it becomes a pudding sauce, though it carries no sugar of its own and expects a sweet pudding beneath it.
"Drawn butter" is the American name for what English cooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries simply called melted butter thickened with flour and water so that it pours as a sauce rather than a slick of oil. It is often said to have been the default sauce of the English-speaking kitchen for well over a century, appearing beside fish, boiled fowl, greens and puddings alike, and it seems to have drawn a certain amount of mockery from French-trained cooks and from American travellers who had eaten better abroad. Its survival in a Waldorf book is telling: Oscar Tschirky was the hotel's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and his 1896 collection mixes grand hotel cookery with the plain domestic repertoire his American readers already knew. The two finishes given here — plain for savory dishes, wine and nutmeg for sweet — show how thoroughly one sauce was expected to do the work of several.