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White and Brown Roux
Roux is a thickening of flour and butter for sauces. When carefully made it will keep for a month. For white roux take one-half of a pound of butter, put it in a thick bottomed sauce pan and stand on the side of the fire where it will slowly melt; skim carefully and when entirely liquid pour off the clear butter from the white curd. Clean the a sauce pan, return the butter to it and heat carefully; when it bubbles add one-half of a pound of sifted flour and stir until well mixed, then draw aside where it will cook without coloring for ten minutes. Turn into earthern jars or tumblers with tight covers and keep in a cool place. When needed heat the milk, stock, or other liquid and just before it reaches the simmering point stir in one tablespoonful of roux for each cupful of liquid, stirring until the sauce is thick and smooth. Brown roux is made in the same way except that the butter is allowed to cook until it is quite dark brown in color; it is then finished as above.
A make-ahead thickening paste of clarified butter and flour, kept on hand so sauces can be built in minutes. The instructions are sound; only the fire management and the storage advice need translating.
- The hinge: clarify firstPouring off the clear fat and leaving the white curd behind is what lets this keep and what lets it brown cleanly. Milk solids left in the butter scorch and speckle the roux, and they are the part that spoils fastest.
- Yield after clarifyingHalf a pound of butter renders roughly 6 oz of clear fat, so the finished roux is not quite equal parts by weight. Weigh the clarified butter and match it with flour if you want a true 1:1 paste.
- "The side of the fire"A range top has no cool edge, so use the lowest burner setting or a heat diffuser. Melt and clarify over gentle heat, low enough that the butter never colors; for the ten-minute flour cook, keep it barely bubbling and stir often.
- White roux, ten minutesTen minutes over low heat is enough to lose the raw-flour taste without taking on color, which is exactly right. If it starts to blond, pull it off the heat.
- Brown roux, read this carefullyThe text browns the butter dark before the flour goes in, which is easy to take past bitterness. Modern practice is generally to brown the butter and flour together, stirring constantly, until the paste is the color of hazelnut shells; darker roux thickens less.
- Proportion and thicknessOne tablespoon of roux per cup of liquid makes a thin pouring sauce. Use two per cup for a standard béchamel or velouté, three for something that will coat and hold, and expect to use more if the roux is dark.
- Adding it to liquidThe direction to stir it into hot liquid just below a simmer is correct and avoids lumps, since the cold fat disperses as it melts. Whisk it in a little at a time, then bring the sauce to a gentle boil for a minute or two to let the starch swell fully.
- StorageA month in "a cool place" assumed a cold larder. Refrigerate it in a sealed jar and use within about a month, or freeze it in tablespoon portions.
Roux is French kitchen grammar, developed in French professional cookery from the seventeenth century onward and codified in the eighteenth and nineteenth, and carried into American household books by way of cooking-school teachers who trained on French method. The word means "reddish" or "russet" in French, a name generally taken to come from the browned version rather than the pale one. A jar made in advance would have saved time in any kitchen aiming at a French standard of sauce-making: butter and flour cooked together and stored cold meant that gravy, cream sauce or a soup could be thickened without stopping to make a paste from scratch, alongside plainer thickenings like flour stirred into cold water.