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Cream Sauce
Anonymous.
Cream together a large tablespoon of butter with a little flour, and put over a gentle heat; add a little chopped parsley, a little grated onion, pepper, salt, and nutmeg: when these ingredients are well mixed, add half a pint of cream or milk and let it boil for fifteen minutes. If used with fresh fish, a little horse radish may be added.
A plain white sauce built on butter and flour, seasoned before the liquid goes in. The proportions are workable, but the cooking time reflects an era of slow coal ranges and needs rethinking.
- Half a pintOne cup in American measure, or a scant 1 1/4 cups if the book's Imperial pint is intended. Either amount will thicken with a tablespoon of butter and roughly the same volume of flour, though the larger quantity gives a thinner, more pourable sauce.
- "A large tablespoon of butter"About 1 oz, or 2 modern tablespoons. Nineteenth-century tablespoons generally ran larger than the level 15 ml spoon, and period recipes often intended a rounded rather than a level spoonful.
- "A little flour"Unspecified, and genuinely so. For a sauce of pouring consistency, match the flour to the butter by volume; more flour gives the thick binding sauce used to nap fish.
- Fifteen minutes is too longA dairy sauce held at a boil that long will reduce heavily, catch on the pan bottom, and may break. Bring it just to a boil, then hold at a bare simmer for three to five minutes, whisking, which is enough to cook out the raw flour taste.
- Cook the roux firstThe instruction to cream the butter and flour over gentle heat before anything else goes in is the hinge of the recipe. Give it a minute or two without colouring, then add the liquid gradually off the boil to keep it smooth.
- Grated onionOnion grated on a box grater releases juice that can turn a milk sauce slightly sharp. A teaspoon is plenty; if the sauce is to sit, strain it before serving.
- HorseradishMost likely fresh grated root rather than the vinegar-packed prepared kind the phrase suggests today, though bottled preparations did exist by this date. Stir it in at the end, since heat drives off its pungency within a few minutes.
- YieldRoughly one cup, enough to sauce fish or vegetables for four.
White sauces of this kind descend from the French béchamel family, which entered English and American household cookery through the professional kitchen and was steadily simplified along the way. By the 1870s, when The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by ladies of Chicago and later of Toronto, a butter-and-flour cream sauce was standard equipment in any competent household kitchen, the default dressing for boiled fish, poached eggs and plain vegetables. Parsley, onion and nutmeg season the sauce here, and nutmeg in particular turns up in savoury cream dishes far more often in Victorian books than in modern ones. The horseradish note attached to fish reflects a long-standing British pairing rather than anything specific to this compiler.