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Paprika Cream Sauce
Heat in a small saucepan one ounce butter, add an ounce flour, and stir on the fire while heating for one minute, pour in half a gill milk and three-fourths gill of cream, season with half a teaspoon salt, a light half teaspoon paprika and half a saltspoon grated nutmeg, sharply mix with a whisk until it comes to a boil, boil for two minutes longer and use as required. Saturday, Second Week of September
A very stiff white sauce enriched with cream and reddened with paprika — closer to a coating sauce or a binder for croquettes than a pouring sauce. Two things need attention: the old liquid measures, and the fact that the flour-to-liquid ratio is far thicker than modern practice.
- Gills, in cupsA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup of milk; three-fourths gill of cream is 3 fluid ounces, 6 tablespoons.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon of nutmeg is an eighth of a teaspoon, which is about right for this quantity; grate it fresh.
- The ratio is deliberately thickOne ounce butter (about 2 tablespoons) and one ounce flour (about a quarter cup) against only 5 fluid ounces of liquid gives a paste that will barely fall from the spoon. That is correct if you are binding a filling. For a sauce to nap fish, chicken or eggs, add another 4 to 6 fluid ounces of milk, whisked in a little at a time.
- Cook the roux, but only brieflyOne minute over moderate heat is enough to lose the raw-flour taste without colouring it; this sauce should stay pale so the paprika reads clearly.
- Add liquid off the boil and whisk hardWith this little liquid the mixture seizes instantly. Pull the pan from the heat, pour in the milk and cream, whisk smooth, then return it. The instruction to whisk "sharply" is the hinge of the recipe.
- Paprika has changedPaprika sold around 1900 was commonly Hungarian but varied considerably in pungency; the reliably mild sweet grades came later. Modern jars range from sweet to hot to smoked; use sweet Hungarian for the intended result, and check that it smells of anything at all — stale paprika contributes colour and dust and nothing else. Stirring it into the roux for a few seconds before the liquid deepens the colour, but it scorches quickly.
- YieldAbout two-thirds of a cup as written, enough to bind a small filling; thinned with the extra 4 to 6 fluid ounces it comes to something over a cup.
Filippini's International Cook Book belongs to the moment when paprika became a fashionable marker of "Hungarian" cooking in American and Anglo-French hotel kitchens. Capsicum peppers reached Hungary by way of the Ottoman Balkans and were being ground into paprika there well before they were much used further west; the spice arrived in the grand restaurant repertoire in the later nineteenth century, largely attached to chicken and veal dishes and to sauces of exactly this type — a plain flour-and-butter white sauce, enriched with cream and tinted rose. The structure here is textbook classical French: a roux, a milk liquid, a defined seasoning, and the closing phrase "use as required," which tells you it was written as a component rather than a dish, to be pulled off the stove and spooned over whatever the day's menu called for.