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Drawn Butter
Drawn butter forms the basis of most sauces. From this a great variety may be made, by adding to this different flavours-anchovies, ochra, onions, celery, parsley, mint, and relishes-using those flavours, which are suitable for the meat, game, or fish, with which the sauces are to be served. A good standard receipt for drawn butter is as follows: Rub one tablespoon of flour with one-quarter of a pound of butter; when well mixed, put in a saucepan with a tablespoon of milk or water; set in a dish of boiling water, shaking it well until the butter melts and is near boiling. It should not be set directly on the stove or over the coals, as the heat will make the butter oily and spoil it.
A working sauce base rather than a finished dish: melted butter thickened just enough to cling. The whole method turns on gentle, indirect heat.
- Never over direct heatThe instruction to set the pan in a dish of boiling water is the hinge of the recipe. Butter held over a flame separates and turns oily, and the sauce breaks; a double boiler or a heatproof bowl over simmering water keeps it below the point where the emulsion splits.
- The liquid is almost certainly shortOne tablespoon of milk or water to a quarter pound of butter gives a barely fluid glaze, not a pourable sauce. Other drawn butter receipts of the period call for considerably more hot water, added gradually. As written, the quantity is ambiguous enough that it may be a printing slip; expect to add liquid a spoonful at a time until it coats a spoon.
- Flour to butterOne tablespoon of flour (about 8 g) to 4 oz / 113 g butter is far less flour than a modern roux. The flour is there to stabilise, not to thicken heavily, so the finished sauce stays glossy and loose.
- Rub, don't cookWorking raw flour into the butter is what French cooking calls beurre manié. Nothing browns and nothing toasts, so the sauce stays pale.
- Bring it near boiling, then stop"Near boiling" matters: the flour needs enough heat to lose its raw taste and swell, but a hard boil in a butter-heavy emulsion encourages separation. A minute or two of steady whisking at a bare shiver is enough.
- The flavourings"Ochra" is okra, cooked soft and sieved or chopped fine. Anchovies mean salted fillets or anchovy essence, both very salty — season the base only after adding them. Herbs go in at the end so they keep their colour.
- YieldAs written, roughly half a cup, enough for four modest servings alongside fish or boiled vegetables. Thinned with water to a proper sauce consistency it will stretch to about a cup.
- Holding itDrawn butter does not reheat well once it has cooled and set. Keep it in the water bath off the heat and whisk briefly before serving rather than warming it a second time.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of English and American kitchens for most of the nineteenth century — "drawn" usually read in the older sense of melted or rendered, though the word is also glossed as butter drawn off or clarified, the same usage that gives us drawn butter for lobster today. It sat where a French cook would have reached for a velouté or a sauce blanche, and cookbook writers on both sides of the Atlantic often treated it much as this entry does: a base to be flavoured rather than a dish in itself. The list of additions is telling. Anchovy, parsley and mint are straight out of the English tradition, while okra points to the Southern and Creole cooking that American compilers were increasingly borrowing from. The Home Cook Book belongs to the wave of community cookbooks assembled from contributed receipts by groups of women, often to raise money for a hospital or charity, and its authority comes from consensus rather than from a single professional hand — which is why the flavour list is generous and the measurements are not.