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Brown Sauce
2 tablespoonfuls but- 1/4 cup brown stock 1 teaspoonful salt ter 2 tablespoonfuls flour teaspoonful pepper A small slice of onion Melt butter, put in onion, and when slightly browned, the flour. Cook together until a little darker in color. Pour in stock gradually, as in directions given for adding milk to white sauces (see page 68). Let boil one minute and strain.
Note: A few drops of kitchen bouquet will darken sauces and gravies when the butter and flour have not been sufficiently browned at first.
A basic brown roux sauce, the poultry-stock counterpart to the book's white sauce. The whole character of it comes from how far you take the flour in the butter.
- Quantities, cleaned upThe columns have been scrambled in printing: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup brown stock, 1 teaspoon salt, a fraction of a teaspoon of pepper (the numeral is lost and cannot be recovered), and a small slice of onion. A teaspoon of salt to one cup of sauce is on the salty side if your stock is already seasoned; add it at the end instead.
- The hinge is the rouxCook the butter and flour until they smell nutty and turn the color of a copper penny — three to five minutes over medium heat, stirring constantly. Stop short of that and the sauce tastes of raw flour; take it to dark brown and it loses thickening power, so a pale roux is the lesser mistake.
- Brown stockStock made from browned bones and vegetables; in books of this period usually beef or veal. Roast bones and trimmings before simmering, or use a good unsalted stock and accept a lighter sauce. Modern bouillon cubes and concentrates carry enough salt that the full teaspoon of added salt would be too much.
- Adding the liquidThe cross-reference is to the white sauce method: pour in a little stock, whisk to a smooth paste, then add the rest gradually. Warm stock incorporates more easily than cold, but either works if you add it in stages.
- One minute, then strainThe minute of boiling is what sets the starch and removes any pastiness. Straining catches the onion and any lumps — a fine sieve is enough; there is no need for cheesecloth.
- Kitchen BouquetStill sold: a caramel-and-vegetable-extract browning liquid. It colors without thickening and adds a faint savory note. A few drops is the correct dose; more tastes of burnt sugar.
- YieldAbout one cup. It thickens as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful more stock when reheated.
Brown sauce is the domesticated descendant of the French sauce espagnole, which in professional kitchens meant a brown roux, brown stock, tomato and a long reduction. American household writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School book among them — compressed it into a one-cup formula of this kind and set it beside white sauce as one of two foundations a cook was expected to know by heart. The recipe appears here as a component to be referred back to rather than a meal in itself, which is why it carries a cross-reference to the white sauce method. The note about Kitchen Bouquet shows the writer could assume the reader had access to a bottled browning sauce.