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White Sauce
Put four ounces of butter into a small saucepan and melt it; then add one teacupful of flour that has been dried in the oven, and a chopped shallot, and stir over the fire until well incorporated. Then pour in slowly sufficient white broth to make a thin sauce, and let it simmer gently by the side of the fire for an hour and a half, stirring it occasionally to prevent it sticking to the saucepan. Beat one wineglassful of white wine with a small quantity of cream, mix it with the sauce, and turn it into a jar until ready to serve.
This is a velouté in nineteenth-century dress: a blond roux loosened with pale stock and cooked long enough to lose all trace of raw flour. The finish with wine and cream goes in at the end, off the heat.
- Butter and flourFour ounces of butter is one American stick, 113 g. A teacupful in this period is usually reckoned at 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a cup of flour -- a flour-heavy roux rather than an equal-parts one, which suits a sauce meant to simmer for ninety minutes.
- Drying the flourSpreading flour on a sheet in a low oven until it dries out but stays pale is a step that appears often in cookery books of the period; it shortens the time needed to cook out the pasty taste. The recipe gives no temperature. Skip it if you like, but then keep the roux moving over low heat for a good five minutes before adding liquid.
- White brothA pale, unsalted veal or chicken stock, skimmed clear and never browned. Use a low-sodium chicken stock; a dark or heavily seasoned broth will both colour and over-season the sauce, which reduces considerably in an hour and a half.
- "By the side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the top plate: a bare tremble, not a simmer. On a gas or electric hob use the lowest setting, or a heat diffuser, and expect to add stock as it reduces. The recipe asks only for occasional stirring, though skimming any butterfat that rises will give a cleaner-tasting result.
- The shallotIt is there for flavour, not texture. Strain the finished sauce through a fine sieve or chinois before the wine and cream go in, unless you want flecks in a sauce whose whole point is smoothness.
- Wine and cream at the endA wineglassful is about 2 fluid ounces. Beat the wine into the cream first, as directed. The recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat, but adding the mixture off the heat is safer, since acid poured into a hot, reduced sauce can make cream separate. A dry white with no oak.
- Holding it"Turn it into a jar" assumed a cool larder and same-day service. Refrigerate it, press a film against the surface or float a little melted butter on top to stop a skin forming, and reheat gently, thinning with stock.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of broth, only 'sufficient... to make a thin sauce', so the yield depends entirely on how much stock you add; the butter and flour here will carry a substantial amount.
Oscar Tschirky, ma tre d'h tel of the Waldorf from 1893 and the compiler of this 1896 book, was working within the French repertoire that ran every large American hotel kitchen of the period, and this is the sauce Car me and then Escoffier catalogued as velout a blond roux wetted with pale stock rather than milk, which is what "white sauce" usually means to a modern cook. The long, slow simmer at the side of the range and the repeated skimming were not fussiness but a way to get a clean sauce from flour and stock; a hotel kitchen of the period may well have kept such a sauce going as a base and finished portions of it to order with wine, cream, mushroom liquor or egg yolk, though the book itself does not say so. The instruction to turn it into a jar is a reminder that this was mother-sauce stock-in-trade, made in quantity in the morning and drawn on all evening.