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Drawn Butter
Rub a small cup of butter into half a table-spoon flour, beating it to a cream, adding, if needed, a little salt; pour on it half a pint boiling water, stirring it fast, and taking care not to let it quite boil, as boiling makes it oily and unfit for use. The boiling may be prevented by placing the sauce-pan containing it in a larger one of boiling water, covering and shaking frequently until it reaches the boiling point. A great variety of sauces which are excellent to eat with fish, poultry, or boiled meats, can be made by adding different herbs, such as parsley, mint, or sweet marjoram, to drawn butter. First throw them into boiling water, cut fine, and they are ready to be added, when serve immediately, with two hard-boiled eggs, chopped fine. This makes a nice sauce to serve with baked fish. The chopped inside of a lemon with the seeds out, to which the chicken liver has been added, makes a good sauce for boiled chicken. For anchovy sauce, add two tea-spoons of anchovy extract or paste (kept by all grocers) to a half pint of drawn butter sauce, and stir well. For lobster sauce, chop the meat of the tail and claws of a good-sized lobster into pieces (not too small). Half an hour before dinner, make half a pint of drawn-butter, add the chopped lobster, a pinch of coral, another of cayenne, and a little salt. When done it should not be a solid mass, but the pieces of lobster should appear distinctly in the thin cream.
This is the nineteenth-century American workhorse sauce: butter loosened with water and barely bound with flour, then flavored a dozen ways. The whole thing hinges on heat control.
- Never let it boilThe half tablespoon of flour is far too little to stabilize the sauce, so it holds together as a loose emulsion rather than a true roux-thickened one. Bring it just to the point of steaming and it stays creamy; let it boil and the butterfat separates out into the "oily" state the recipe warns about.
- Use the water-bath methodSetting the small pan inside a larger pan of boiling water is a bain-marie, and it is the reliable way to do this. Whisk or shake steadily; the sauce needs agitation to stay combined.
- "A small cup of butter"Genuinely ambiguous. Nineteenth-century "cups" were not standardised, and a small teacup could hold well under 8 fluid ounces. Read it as somewhere between 1/2 cup (4 oz, one stick) and 3/4 cup. Start with 1/2 cup against the 1 cup of water and add more butter if you want it richer.
- Half a pintOne cup, 8 fluid ounces. The recipe's own variations ("a half pint of drawn butter sauce") assume the finished sauce measures about that.
- Anchovy extractThe bottled essence sold by every grocer in the 1880s is largely gone; anchovy paste in a tube is the direct replacement and two teaspoons per cup is about right. Taste before adding salt, since the paste brings plenty.
- CoralThe "pinch of coral" is the roe of a female lobster, dark green raw and coral-red once cooked. Not every lobster on sale will have it. Its job here is color and a mineral edge; without it the sauce simply reads paler.
- The chicken liverCook it first. The recipe assumes the liver has been simmered with the boiled fowl; a raw liver stirred into a sauce held below boiling will not reach a safe temperature. Poach or sauté it through, then chop it fine with the lemon flesh.
- HerbsBlanching parsley, mint or marjoram in boiling water before chopping sets the green color and takes the raw edge off. Add them at the last moment, off the heat, and serve at once.
"Drawn butter" is the American name for what English cookbooks of the same era called melted butter, and for most of the nineteenth century it was the foundation sauce of the plain English-descended kitchen on both sides of the Atlantic: butter, a little flour, hot water, and then whatever the dinner required. Compilations like The Dixie Cook Book (assembled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published in the 1880s) file it under sauces precisely because it is a platform rather than a dish, spun off here into parsley, egg, lemon-and-liver, anchovy and lobster versions with no additional technique to learn. That single entry covers what a French kitchen of the period would have called sauce bâtarde and its derivatives; the coral and cayenne in the lobster version, and the bottled anchovy extract "kept by all grocers," are good markers of how far commercial groceries had reached into the Southern household table by then.