Home › The World's Kitchen › Cream Sauce
Cream Sauce
Place in a small saucepan three-quarters of an ounce clarified butter and two tablespoons flour; briskly stir while cooking for two minutes. Pour in three-quarters of a gill hot milk and three-quarters of a gill cold cream. Season with half a light teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; briskly whisk for two minutes, then let gently boil for five minutes and serve.
A small, thick béchamel enriched with cream — barely three-quarters of a cup finished. The proportions are flour-heavy by modern standards, and the seasoning is bolder than the name suggests.
- The gillA US gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup, so three-quarters of a gill is 3 fl oz (6 tablespoons). An imperial gill is 5 fl oz, making it 3¾ fl oz if you read the book as British. Total liquid is therefore about 6 fl oz on the US reading, or about 7½ fl oz on the imperial one.
- Butter and flourThree-quarters of an ounce of clarified butter is about 1½ tablespoons. By weight that is slightly more fat than flour, so the roux should come together as a paste rather than a dry crumb, though it is a stiff one for the amount of liquid that follows.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in six ounces of sauce is genuinely hot; a pinch is closer to what most palates now expect from a cream sauce, and the nutmeg at the same quantity will dominate as well.
- Cook the roux properlyThe two minutes of brisk stirring before the liquid goes in is the hinge. Undercooked flour tastes raw and no amount of later simmering in a sauce this thick will disguise it. Keep the heat moderate so the butter does not brown.
- Hot milk, cold creamThe recipe calls for the milk hot and the cream cold and does not say why; hot liquid does help the roux loosen without lumping. Add the milk in stages, whisking smooth between each.
- The five-minute boilTake "gently boil" as a bare simmer, stirred. At a hard rolling boil a quantity this small can catch on the bottom.
- YieldAbout ¾ cup — enough to nap two to four portions of poached fish, eggs or vegetables. Double it if you want it as a base for a gratin.
Cream sauce is the domestic English name for what French kitchens call sauce crème, a béchamel finished with cream, and it turns up widely in the general cookbooks of the period because it was the workhorse behind creamed chicken, creamed eggs, creamed onions and a hundred chafing-dish suppers. The nutmeg is the older survival here: grated nutmeg in white sauces goes back well before the nineteenth century and is still standard in classical béchamel. What marks this version as of its moment is the cayenne, which is often said to have been a common seasoning in Anglo-American cooking around 1900.