No. 440

Butter Sauce

Sauce au Beurre

Put into a saucepan, two heaping tablespoonfuls of flour, dilute it with half a pint of cold water, add some salt and whole peppers, one clove, grated nutmeg, and half an ounce of butter. Set it on the fire, and stir well until it boils; then allow it to cook slowly for fifteen minutes; remove it from the fire, and incorporate into it by degrees, one pound of fresh butter, and the juice of two lemons. If the sauce should become too thick, add a little more water, then strain it through a tammy. With this sauce a quantity of other sauces may be made such as caper, egg, oyster, horse-radish, etc.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A flour-thickened butter sauce of the old French kitchen — the ancestor of what is usually called sauce bâtarde. Everything depends on the butter going in off the heat.

The hinge: butter off the fireRanhofer says to remove the pan from the heat before working in the pound of butter, and he means it. The flour-and-water base is only there to hold an emulsion; if the sauce is allowed to boil once the butter is in, it will separate into oil and starchy water. Add the butter cold, in small pieces, whisking each addition in before the next.
MeasuresHalf a pint is one cup (about 240 ml). Half an ounce of butter at the start is one tablespoon; the pound worked in at the end is four sticks, 450 g. Two heaping tablespoonfuls of flour is roughly 25–30 g.
The proportions are extreme by modern habitA pound of butter to a cup of water gives a very rich sauce and a generous quantity — well over a pint, enough for eight to twelve servings of poached fish or boiled vegetables. Halving or quartering the whole formula works without adjustment.
Fifteen minutes is not paddingThe slow simmer of the flour-and-water base cooks out the raw starch taste. Skipping it leaves a pasty edge that the butter will not disguise. Stir often; a thin flour slurry catches easily.
Whole peppers and cloveThey are aromatics, not seasoning to be eaten — the tammy takes them out. Use six or eight black peppercorns and a single clove, and strain before the butter goes in if you would rather not fish them out later.
TammyA tammy was a fine worsted cloth through which sauce was wrung by two people twisting the ends. A chinois, or a fine sieve lined with damp muslin, does the same job. Strain the base while it is still thin rather than after the pound of butter is in.
Lemon at the endThe juice of two lemons is about 5 tablespoons, which is assertive. Add it gradually and taste; acidity also helps keep the emulsion stable, so it should not be omitted entirely.
Holding itThis sauce will not survive reheating or a long wait on a hot stove. Keep it barely warm — below about 140°F — in a bain-marie and use it within the hour.
The derivativesCapers, chopped hard-boiled egg, poached and bearded oysters, or grated horseradish are stirred in at the end, into the finished sauce off the heat. Oysters need only to warm through; a minute or two, no more.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years, in two separate spells, running the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the hot sauce chapter is essentially the Carême-and-Gouffé French repertoire transplanted to an American dining room. Sauce au beurre belongs to the family the French also call sauce bâtarde — the "bastard" sauce, a name often explained by its standing outside the main sauce families, though that account is traditional rather than settled; here a flour-and-water liaison does the binding work. Its usefulness is exactly what Ranhofer points out in the last line: it is a neutral, mildly acidulated base from which caper, egg, oyster and horseradish sauces are made by addition alone, which is why a professional kitchen would keep the mother sauce going and finish small quantities to order. The enormous butter-to-liquid ratio is characteristic of restaurant cooking of the period, when a sauce was judged on richness and gloss before anything else.