White Sauce
1/3 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1½ cups milk 1½ tablespoons Mazola 1½ tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Stir the Mazola, cornstarch and seasonings together in a small saucepan. Gradually add the milk, stirring constantly. Bring to boiling point and boil three minutes.
A cornstarch-thickened bechamel from a corn products promotional booklet, using oil in place of butter. It works, but it behaves differently from a flour roux.
- The fractionsThe "11/2" figures are 1 1/2 — a cup and a half of milk, a tablespoon and a half each of oil and cornstarch. The odd 1/3 teaspoon salt is as printed; 1/2 teaspoon is the usual modern figure for this quantity.
- Mazola, Argo, Kingsford'sBrand names from the sponsoring company. Mazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil works; Argo and Kingsford's are plain cornstarch. Butter can be substituted one for one, though the sauce will taste less flat.
- Why cornstarch, not flourCornstarch has roughly twice the thickening power of flour, so 1 1/2 tablespoons here gives a medium sauce — the consistency you want for creamed chicken or vegetables. Swapping in flour by the same measure will give you a noticeably thinner sauce.
- The three minutes matterThis is the hinge. Cornstarch thickens well before it is cooked, and a sauce pulled off at first thickening tastes chalky. The full boil drives off the raw starch flavour, and it needs to be a real boil, not a shiver.
- Stir, then stopConstant stirring while it comes up to the boil prevents lumps and scorching, but once thickened, prolonged beating breaks the starch gel down and the sauce thins again. Keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving gently.
- Oil separates more readilyAn oil-based sauce tends not to hold together as well as a butter one. Serve it promptly; if it stands, whisk briefly over low heat rather than boiling it a second time.
- Holding and reheatingCornstarch sauces weep on standing and tend to separate on freezing and thawing. Press plastic wrap onto the surface to stop a skin forming, and plan to use it the same meal.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups, enough to cream roughly a pound of cooked vegetables, fish or poultry — two to four luncheon servings.
This is house-brand cookery: Argo, Kingsford's and Mazola were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and booklets like this one existed to show cooks that corn oil and cornstarch could do the work of butter and flour. The dish itself is the foundation of the American luncheon table of the period — white sauce is what turned leftover chicken, salmon, eggs or peas into creamed something-on-toast, and cookbooks of the Fannie Farmer generation drilled it as a graduated formula, thin for soups, medium for creaming, thick for croquettes. The substitution being advertised here was a real one. Corn oil was cheaper and kept better than butter, and refined corn products were marketed hard through the 1910s and 1920s as modern, scientific alternatives to dairy fat.