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White Sauce (One pint of white sauce one)
One pint of white sauce, one pint of rich cream, salt, pepper. Let the sauce and cream come to a boil separately. Mix them together and boil up once.
A two-line finishing sauce that assumes you already have a pint of white sauce standing by. Everything depends on what that base is and on how hard you let the cream boil.
- The hinge: barely boil"Boil up once" means bring to the boil and pull it off immediately. Cream held at a rolling boil, especially with salt and a flour-thickened sauce, will tighten and can break into a grainy, oily surface. Bring both to a bare boil, combine, let it swell once, then take it off the heat.
- What "white sauce" meantIn American cookbooks of this kind it is a plain milk sauce: butter and flour cooked together without colouring, then milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Proportions varied from book to book, and this recipe assumes you have the book's own base version to hand.
- Rich creamPeriod "rich cream" means the richest cream to hand, not thin cream or half-and-half; treat it as heavy or whipping cream today. Lower-fat cream will thin the finished sauce noticeably, since the whole point of the addition is enrichment rather than volume.
- Heating separatelyHeating both first keeps the final cooking brief: they go together already hot and need only a moment on the heat, rather than a long reheat that would risk the cream.
- SeasoningNo quantities are given. Salt lightly at the start and correct at the end, since the cream mutes salt on first taste. White pepper is the usual choice in pale sauces so the sauce stays unspecked.
- YieldAbout a quart, enough to sauce game or poultry for eight to twelve. Halve it for a household portion; the proportions scale directly.
- Holding and reheatingKeep it warm over hot, not boiling, water and press plastic wrap or a butter film on the surface to stop a skin forming. Reheat gently and whisk; a hard reheat is where cream sauces of this type usually fail.
Filed under Game, this is the plain enriched béchamel that American cooking poured over almost everything pale — creamed birds, rabbit, sweetbreads, croquette mixtures and vol-au-vent fillings. White sauce was so basic to the period's kitchen that every later recipe simply called for "a pint of white sauce" as if for a pantry staple. The doubling with an equal quantity of cream marks this as a richer sauce than the everyday version: cream was expensive. The technique itself descends from French béchamel, whose name is traditionally attached to Louis de Bechameil, a steward in Louis XIV's household, and which arrived in English and American cookbooks in a simplified, milk-and-flour form and stayed there for the better part of two centuries.