The housewife's referee

To make sauces well is a great thing, and yet how few cooks really take the trouble to make them properly ! They hurry over them, and consequently send up to table a sort of paperhangers' paste, or a thin butter-and-water mixture. To make good sauce takes a little time, but not very long, and as sauces and gravies constitute the perfection of entries, even for a simple mince or hash, it is very necessary to make them properly. In the first place, cooks often roll butter and flour * See drainers in first part of the book. THE housewife's REFEREE together in any haphazard manner, fry it quickly, then put in the other ingredients and boil till thick, and never dream of straining it. It takes them about five minutes and they think "it will do." Now, I am well aware that many cookery books and good cooks advise the rolling of fiour and butter together and then frying, and no doubt it can be done so, and well too ; but since cooks as a rule hurry so over their cooking, I will explain my way of making sauces, which I have taught all my cooks to do, and the result is the sauce is invariably smooth. All sauces derive from two sorts, brown sauce and white sauce, and the flavourings make the numerous sauces which are used in cookery. The first thing in making a white sauce is to take a tablespoonful of flour (this will make a good tureen full) and mix it in a basin with a little milk till it is a smooth paste ; whilst doing this have a small stewpan on the fire, with a piece of butter the size of a plum in it ; when the butter is melted and very hot add the smooth paste, give it a good stir round, and then add a little salt, more milk, and whatever white stock or flavouring is required ; stir over the fire till it thickens and the mixture leaves the sides of the stewpan and coats the spoon. If it becomes too thick, add a gill of cold water and boil up again, and then pass through a fine strainer into the tureen or dish it is to be served in. If cooked some time before it is wanted, and there be no bain-marie to keep the saucepan in, I put it into a larger saucepan of boiling water and let it stand on the stove till required ; but it must never be allowed to boil up again. The " gourmet boilers " are capital things for keeping sauces, etc., warm and simmering ; they are made in earthenware and put inside a stewpan of hot water. You may leave them for hours and they will never boil. I use them constantly myself, and for those who do not possess a bain-marie they are a sine qua non. Brown sauces are made exactly in the same way as white. The only difference is that the flour is mixed first with cold gravy or stock, instead of milk, and added to the boiling butter in the same way. Of course where oysters, button mushrooms, shrimps, pieces of lobster, etc., are used in the sauces, the sauce must be strained, and these put in afterwards. Cooks may say, " This is all extra trouble " ; but it is no trouble, and only takes two or three minutes longer than their usual rough fashion, and certainly the sauce repays this extra outlay of time, for unless some care be taken, a successful result is impossible.