Home › Left-Over Poultry › Mustard Sauce
Mustard Sauce
Brown lightly together half a tablespoonful of butter and half a tablespoonful of flour. Add slowly a quarter of a cup of hot water. Beat well.
When thick and smooth, stir in half a tablespoonful lemon juice, a little salt and cayenne, and one scant teaspoonful of mixed mustard. Then beat in slowly two tablespoonfuls of cream.
Sour Cream Dressing (for Vegetable Salads) Mash one hard-cooked egg yolk with half a teaspoonful of butter until very smooth and creamy. Season with salt, paprika, a little mustard, and two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice. Beat in four tablespoonfuls of sour cream, or any unsweetened condensed milk that may have soured.
Two small dressings, both built in a few minutes and both scaled for one or two people rather than a table. The quantities are tiny by modern habit, so read the yield before you start.
- YieldThe mustard sauce makes something under half a cup, enough for two small servings. Double or triple it freely; the proportions hold.
- "Mixed mustard"This means prepared mustard, not dry mustard powder — mustard already mixed to a paste. Dijon works, but it is sharper, so start with half and taste.
- Brown lightly togetherThe instruction is a blond-to-light-brown roux, cooked perhaps two minutes over moderate heat until it smells nutty. Cooking beyond that costs thickening power, and this sauce has very little flour to spare.
- Adding the waterA quarter cup of hot water against half a tablespoon each of butter and flour gives a thin, pourable sauce, not a coating one. Add it in two or three additions and beat between each to avoid lumps.
- Keep it off the boil after the creamHeat after the cream -- Lemon juice plus dairy can curdle if the sauce is allowed to simmer, so keep the heat low once the cream goes in and serve promptly. The recipe itself gives no instruction about removing the pan from the heat.
- Cream"Cream" here is unspecified and could be anything from a light table cream to a heavy one. Heavy cream gives the richest result; half-and-half will work but thins the sauce further.
- The sour cream dressingPress the cooked yolk through a fine sieve rather than mashing it with a fork; the texture depends entirely on there being no granules left. Two tablespoons of lemon juice to four of sour cream is a sharp dressing, suited to boiled potatoes, beets or cucumber.
- Soured condensed milkIgnore this line. The book is salvaging an opened can that has gone acidic on the shelf — spoilage, not culture, and there is no way to know what grew in it. Use cultured sour cream, crème fraîche or plain full-fat yogurt instead.
Left-over cookery books multiplied in the English-speaking world from the 1890s through the food-control campaigns of the First World War. The sour cream dressing that follows shows the same thrift running one step further, proposing to rescue a soured can of evaporated milk for use on vegetable salads. Evaporated milk had become a fixture of the American pantry after commercial canning expanded in the late nineteenth century, and household writers of the period were still working out what to do with a tin once it was opened and there was no reliable refrigeration to keep it in.