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Drawn Butter Sauce
4 tablespoonfuls but- teaspoonful salt ter 2 tablespoonfuls flour teaspoonful white pepper 1 cup water Melt two tablespoonfuls of the butter, add flour and seasoning, and cook until mixture bubbles.
Add the water slowly, beat and stir until sauce thickens. Remove from fire and beat in the rest of the butter slowly. A few chopped cucumber pickles added to this sauce makes it appetizing with warmed-over fish.
A simple flour-thickened butter sauce, finished with cold butter off the heat. The technique is closer to a modern beurre manié-enriched velouté than to the plain melted butter the name suggests.
- QuantitiesThe ingredient column reads 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour, 1 cup water, plus salt and white pepper. The salt and pepper have lost their fractions, so season by taste; about 1/2 teaspoon salt and a pinch of white pepper suits a cup of sauce.
- The hingeOnly half the butter goes into the roux. The remaining two tablespoons are beaten in after the pan leaves the heat, which is what gives the sauce its gloss and body. If it returns to a boil at that stage the butter breaks out and the sauce turns greasy.
- Cook the roux properly"Cook until mixture bubbles" suggests a minute or two of steady foaming over moderate heat, long enough to lose the raw flour taste without colouring. White pepper rather than black will keep the sauce pale.
- Adding the waterWarm water incorporates more smoothly than cold. Add it in a thin stream while whisking; the mixture will thicken abruptly and then loosen as more liquid goes in.
- Better liquidWater is the frugal option. Chicken or fish stock, or the liquid from poaching the fish, gives a sauce with more flavour for no extra work.
- YieldMakes a generous cup, enough to sauce roughly four servings of reheated fish. It thickens on standing; loosen with a spoonful of hot stock rather than reboiling.
- The pickle variationChopped cucumber pickle stirred in at the end turns this into a rough tartare-style sauce. Add it after the butter, off the heat, so the vinegar does not thin the emulsion while it is still hot.
Drawn butter was one of the workhorse sauces of Anglo-American cooking, served over fish, boiled fowl and plain vegetables. The name is older than the method: to "draw" butter is generally traced to the sense of melting and clarifying it, but by the time household manuals like this one were printed, the term had come to mean a thin white sauce bound with flour and enriched with more butter at the finish, which held together far better on a serving platter. The book appears, on the evidence of a phrase like "warmed-over fish," to be concerned with using up left-overs, and if so its presence there is the whole point of such a book: reheated poultry and fish dry out, and a cheap sauce made from butter, flour and water disguises that, while a handful of chopped pickle supplies the sharpness that yesterday's cooking has lost.