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Cream Sauce for General Use
Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a small saucepan, add one and a half tablespoons flour, briskly stir, then pour in a gill hot milk and half gill cream. Season with two saltspoons salt, half saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon ground nutmeg. Sharply whisk for one minute, then let boil for two minutes and use as directed.
A small-batch béchamel enriched with cream, built on a scant roux. The proportions are for about three-quarters of a cup of sauce — enough to nap one vegetable dish or bind a small filling.
- A gill is half a cupSo the liquid is 1/2 cup hot milk plus 1/4 cup cream, 3/4 cup in all. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, which makes the seasoning 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon cayenne and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg.
- The roux is deliberately thinThe roux is flour-heavy -- One tablespoon butter to one and a half tablespoons flour is more flour than fat, which is why the book calls for brisk stirring — the paste will be dry and crumbly rather than smooth. Cook it 30 seconds or so before the liquid goes in to take off the raw-flour taste, but do not let it colour.
- Hot liquid, added at onceHot liquid -- The instruction to pour in *hot* milk is worth noting (the cream is not said to be heated). Adding the milk hot and whisking hard for the full minute helps keep this from going lumpy; cold milk into a roux this dry is more likely to lump.
- Two minutes of boiling is not a mistakeFlour-thickened sauces need to reach a real boil to hydrate the starch and lose the pasty flavour. Keep whisking through it and pull the pan off as soon as the two minutes are up, before the cream scorches on the bottom.
- Cayenne, not black pepperAn eighth of a teaspoon of cayenne in three-quarters of a cup is assertive by current standards. Halve it if the sauce is going over something delicate, and add it at the end where you can taste as you go.
- ConsistencyAs written this comes out thick enough to coat — closer to a medium béchamel than a pouring sauce. Thin with a spoonful more hot milk if it is to be poured; leave it as is for creamed vegetables, croquette mixtures or gratins.
- It will thicken further off the heatJudge the final texture while it is still hot in the pan. If it is being held, cover the surface directly or whisk in a little milk when you reheat.
Sauce like this is the workhorse of early twentieth-century Anglo-American cooking: the same white sauce, adjusted in thickness, appears as the base for creamed vegetables, croquettes, scalloped dishes and dozens of gratins, which is why a general-purpose version earns its own entry rather than being repeated in every recipe. It descends from the French béchamel, one of the sauces codified in nineteenth-century professional kitchens and generally traced back to the household of Louis XIV's steward Louis de Béchameil, though the naming is traditional rather than documented. The seasoning is of its moment — cayenne and nutmeg rather than white pepper are common in English and American recipes of the period, and nutmeg in particular remained a usual partner to milk sauces well into the twentieth century. The measurement in saltspoons is another period marker: the saltspoon was an actual piece of tableware, the smallest spoon in a silver service, and it served as a kitchen measure before standardised sets became common.