Cream Sauce
One pint of cream, one generous tablespoonful of flour, and salt and pepper to taste. Let the cream come to a boil. Have the flour mixed smooth with half a cupful of cold cream reserved from the pint and stir it into the boiling Add seasoning and boil three minutes. This sauce is good for delicate meats, fish and vegetables, and to pour around croquettes and baked Quaker omelets. cream.
A flourless-roux cream sauce: the thickening is a cold-cream slurry, not butter and flour cooked together. The text has been garbled by the scanner — the stray "cream." at the end belongs to "stir it into the boiling cream."
- The hingeMix the flour absolutely smooth with the half cup of cold cream before it goes near the pot, and pour it into the boiling cream in a thin stream while whisking. A slurry dumped in at once is liable to seize into lumps that are hard to beat out.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups; half a cup of that is held back for the slurry, so 1 1/2 cups goes into the pan to boil. A "generous tablespoonful" of flour is roughly a rounded tablespoon, on the order of 10 g — light thickening, meant to coat rather than hold a shape.
- No butterUnlike a béchamel, there is no roux here, so the flour has no fat to keep the grains apart. The cold cream does that job instead, which is why the reserved half cup matters.
- Boiling creamCream at 30% or more fat will hold a boil, but keep it at a bare rolling simmer over medium heat and stir the bottom. Half-and-half or light cream is more prone to catching and scorching.
- The three minutesLong enough to take the raw edge off the flour; the sauce will still thicken slightly as it cools. If it tightens too much, thin with a spoonful of warm milk or stock off the heat.
- Quaker omeletA period name for a baked omelet rather than one folded in the pan; the recipe's own wording ("baked Quaker omelets") is the only guide here, and versions under the name varied. It is not a dish you will find under that name now; the sauce suits any baked egg dish.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough to sauce four to six portions of fish or vegetables, or to pool around a platter of croquettes.
Cream sauce of this kind sits a step below bechamel in the hierarchy of turn-of-the-century American cookery: no roux, no onion or bay, no scalding and straining — just cream, flour and seasoning, finished in minutes. A whole pint of cream is a richer choice than the milk-and-butter white sauce of everyday economy. The list of suggested uses at the end, running from fish to vegetables to omelets, is the mark of a household staple rather than a set-piece.