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Vegetable Sauce
This may be made from either celery, asparagus, cauliflower, green peas or mushrooms. One-half cup of any one of these vegetables may be added to one cup of white sauce No. 2. Serve with chicken, meat, or fish croquettes.
A cross-reference recipe of the sort that fills late-Victorian and Edwardian household manuals: it assumes you already have the base sauce and a bowl of cooked vegetables in the icebox. Two details need filling in — what "white sauce No. 2" was, and how the vegetable should be cut.
- White sauce No. 2Books of this period that numbered their white sauces generally graded them by thickness, though the numbering is not consistent from book to book. A medium pouring sauce of roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and a little pepper, is the likely intention here; check the book's own sauce chapter if it survives. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding the milk so the sauce does not taste of raw flour.
- The vegetables are already cookedThe half cup of celery, asparagus, cauliflower or peas is understood to be cooked and drained. Fold it in at the end and heat through only — a second boil turns green peas grey and asparagus tips to threads.
- Mushrooms are the exceptionRaw mushrooms added straight to the sauce will weep and thin it. Slice and sauté them in butter until the liquid they release has cooked off, then stir them in.
- Cut to match the sauceCelery and asparagus want a small dice or half-inch lengths; cauliflower, small florets broken from the head rather than chopped, which turns it to mush. The pieces should sit on a fork alongside the croquette, not slide off it.
- ConsistencyA cup of sauce plus half a cup of vegetables is thicker than the sauce alone. If it has gone stiff on standing, loosen it with a spoonful or two of warm milk or the vegetable cooking water.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half — enough for four servings of croquettes, allowing a generous spoonful over each.
- Seasoning to finishThe sauce as given is seasoned only with salt and pepper. A grating of nutmeg with cauliflower, lemon juice with asparagus, or a spoonful of sherry with mushrooms lifts it without changing the method.
Numbered or graded white sauces were a teaching device of the American cooking-school movement; by the turn of the century several widely used books divided the béchamel family into thin, medium and thick grades, though the numbering and proportions were never uniform between authors. Once the base was memorised, books like this one could build derivative sauces in three lines apiece — which is what is happening here. Cookbooks devoted to using up left-overs were a recognised genre in the decades around 1900, when refrigeration was unreliable, meat was expensive and a housekeeper's competence was measured partly by how little went into the bin. Croquettes served the same purpose: yesterday's chicken, bound in thick sauce, shaped, crumbed and fried, then dressed with a sauce made from cooked vegetables.