Butter Sauce
Two tablespoonfuls of flour, half a cupful of butter and one pint of boiling water. Work the butter and flour together until creamy and light, and gradually add the boiling water. Stir constantly until it comes to a boil, but do not let it boil. Take from the fire and serve. A tablespoonful of lemon juice and a speck of cayenne may be added if you choose. A tablespoonful of chopped parsley also gives an agreeable change.
A plain flour-and-butter sauce of the kind that once accompanied almost any boiled or roasted game bird. It is thin by modern standards and depends entirely on the emulsion holding together.
- The hinge: keep it below a boilThe instruction to stir until it comes to a boil without boiling is not fussiness. A pint of water against half a cup of butter is a loose emulsion held by only two tablespoons of flour, and a hard boil can break it into a greasy layer over starchy water.
- Butter and flour are not cooked firstThis is a beurre manié worked raw, not a cooked roux, so the flour has no chance to toast before the water goes in.
- MeasuresHalf a cupful is 4 oz, one full stick of butter. A pint here is presumably the American 16 fl oz, two cups. The proportion is rich by modern habit; halving the butter gives a lighter sauce.
- SaltThe recipe names none. Taste and season at the end.
- Speck of cayenneA speck is less than a pinch — the amount that clings to the tip of a knife. Enough to sharpen the butter, not to register as heat.
- Lemon and parsleyAdd both off the heat. Lemon juice stirred into a simmering flour sauce dulls quickly, and parsley loses its colour within a minute of boiling.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups, enough to sauce four to six servings of game or boiled vegetables. It thickens as it cools and may need thinning with a little hot water if held.
Butter sauce in this sense — flour, butter and water, sharpened with lemon — was the workhorse of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cookery, the thing poured over boiled fish, plain vegetables and lean game alike. Wild birds and rabbit carry almost no fat of their own, and roasted or boiled they arrive at the table dry; a fatty sauce was the standard remedy, alongside barding with pork or larding the breast. The technique of working raw butter into flour and letting hot liquid do the cooking appears under names like "drawn butter" through the whole of the previous century. That older term is generally traced to the original idea of butter simply melted or "drawn" and extended with a little thickening — a household sauce, not a restaurant one, made from what was always in the kitchen.