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Foundations for Useful Sauces
Drawn butter sauce is the foundation of Hollandaise Caper and piquante sauces. For drawn butter sauce the proportions are three tablespoonfuls of butter, two of flour and one cupful of water, or white stock, with pepper and salt to season
This is a ratio rather than a method: a small white roux slackened with water or stock. The proportions are sound, and the omitted technique is the part worth spelling out.
- What "drawn butter" isNot clarified butter. In Anglo-American cookery of this period drawn butter is a flour-thickened butter sauce, closer to a thin bechamel or sauce blanche made on water. Modern recipes calling for drawn butter with lobster or crab mean plain melted butter, which is a different thing entirely.
- The method the book assumesA standard method for these proportions -- Melt the butter, stir in the flour and cook the paste a minute or two without letting it colour, then add the cup of liquid gradually, whisking, and simmer until it thickens and loses the raw-flour taste. (Some period versions instead rub the flour into cold butter and add the water to that.) Adding the liquid all at once to a hot roux is how this sauce turns lumpy.
- The proportions in modern termsThree tablespoons butter to two of flour to one cup of liquid gives a medium sauce, thick enough to coat. For a pouring consistency use a cup and a quarter of liquid, or hold back a tablespoon of the flour.
- White stockAn unbrowned stock from veal or chicken bones and white vegetables. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark brown stock, which will darken the sauce.
- Hollandaise built on this baseNineteenth-century American Hollandaise was frequently a drawn butter sauce finished off the heat with egg yolks and lemon juice, not the butter-and-yolk emulsion the name means today. If you follow the book's chain of derivatives, expect a flour-bound sauce with a Hollandaise flavour.
- The derivative saucesCaper sauce is this base with two or three tablespoons of drained capers stirred in at the end, often with a little of their vinegar; it is the traditional partner for boiled mutton. Piquante adds shallots, vinegar and chopped gherkins, reduced before the liquid goes in.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce four servings of fish, boiled meat or vegetables. It thickens further as it cools and can be loosened with a spoonful of hot stock.
Drawn butter was the workhorse sauce of English and American kitchens for well over a century, and its presence in a chapter called "Foundations for Useful Sauces" shows how the small-roux system had settled into domestic teaching. French cooks were generally unimpressed by it, a flour-and-water sauce being asked to do the work of a properly reduced veloute. But it was cheap, it kept its body on the table, and it did not break. Note also what this entry says about the word Hollandaise in American books of the period: it names a flavour profile of butter, egg and acid rather than a fixed technique, and only later did the emulsified version become the sole meaning.