White Sauce
White sauces are distinguished from their relatives the brown gravies by using light-colored fats such as butter or margarine rather than dark fats such as beef drippings. They are very useful in stretching small amounts of leftover chicken, turkey or other poultry to feed an entire family.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon fat
- 1 tablespoon flour
- 1 cup milk
Directions
Melt fat in a small saucepan over low heat. Slowly sprinkle in the flour and stir until smooth. Add the milk slowly, but stir rapidly to prevent lumps.
Once all ingredients are smoothly mixed, bring the mixture to a boil. Stir continuously to prevent scorching.
Once sauce reaches a boil, reduce heat and stir continuously for 1 minute. Remove from heat.
Careful attention to the cooking process is essential to a good result. A white sauce is not something you can start and let cook while you do other things -- it will tell on you if you let it get too hot, typically by forming a hardened and distasteful skin along the surface of the pan.
However, a well-made white sauce is pure heaven, and can make the meat from a left-over chicken leg into a delicious meal. When I was a child, one of our favorite meals was creamed chicken (or turkey) over rice. We didn't get it very often for the simple reason that preparing it took a lot of time, and my mom was often busy helping around the farm.
If you are unable to afford to buy canned cream soups as ingredients in casseroles and the like, knowing how to make a good white sauce will enable you to make your own cream soups.
Thrifty hint -- if butter or margarine is in short supply, but you have access to a roasting chicken, you can substitute chicken fat to make a flavorful white sauce. Called schmaltz in Yiddish, chicken fat is an important ingredient in traditional East European Jewish cooking. To collect the fat from a roasting chicken after baking, you will want to pour it through a strainer to remove solids such as fragments of meat. Because it is hot, you will want to pour it into a glass or metal container, since plastic jars and the like have a nasty tendency to soften or outright melt when hot fats are poured into them. You can store it in the refrigerator for up to a week, or in the freezer for a month or more (too long and the fat may become rancid).
Posted October 10, 2010.
