Drawn Butter
Cook together until well mixed one tablespoonful each of butter and flour, add one cup of broth or water, simmer five minutes, then add another tablespoonful of butter. Season and serve.
A one-cup butter sauce built on a small white roux, thinned with broth and finished with cold butter. It is the American nineteenth-century all-purpose sauce, and it lives or dies on the finishing butter.
- The hinge: the second tablespoonThe recipe simply says to add another tablespoonful of butter; it is best swirled in off the heat, or over the barest warmth, rather than boiled. Cooked hard into the sauce, the finishing butter tends to separate out as fat on the surface instead of enriching it.
- "Drawn butter" is not clarified butterIn British usage drawn butter usually means simply melted butter. In American cookbooks of this period the term commonly covers this flour-thickened sauce, which sits somewhere near a thin velouté.
- Cook the roux, briefly"Until well mixed" means until the flour stops smelling raw and the paste bubbles smooth, roughly a minute. It should not colour; drawn butter is meant to be pale.
- Liquid temperatureAdd the cup of broth warm and in stages, whisking, if you want it lump-free. Cold liquid into hot roux works too but needs steady whisking from the start.
- Broth in the Game chapterBroth or water -- The recipe allows either. Water gives a bland sauce; a light poultry or meat stock, or the pan juices from whatever the sauce is to accompany, makes it worth eating.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, and often a squeeze of lemon. Period cookbooks give named variants built on this same base — parsley, caper, or chopped hard-boiled egg — for serving with fish or boiled fowl.
- Yield and consistencyA little over a cup of sauce. One tablespoon of flour to one cup of liquid gives a thin pouring sauce; double the flour if you want it to coat.
Drawn butter was a standard sauce of the nineteenth-century American kitchen, appearing in household cookbooks with small variations in the ratio of butter to flour. It is a domesticated cousin of the French velouté, arrived at by cooks who had no stockpot going all day: a spoon of flour, a spoon of butter, and whatever liquid was to hand. Its reputation suffered because it was so often made badly — boiled flat, or thickened into paste. The same sauce was commonly reprinted or cross-referenced wherever a chapter needed something poured over roast birds, boiled fish, or asparagus.