Real butter sauce can be made as follows, on a small scale:—Take a claret-glass of water, and about a small teaspoonful of flour mixed with rather more than the same quantity of butter, and mix this in the water over the fire till it is of the consistency of very thin gruel. If it is thicker than this, add a little more water. Now take any quantity of butter, and gradually dissolve as much as you can in this thin gruel, adding say half an ounce at a time, till the sauce becomes a rich oily compound. After a time, if you add too much butter, the sauce will curdle and turn oily, as described by Francatelli.

Of course, in everyday life it is not necessary to have the butter sauce so rich, still it is simply ridiculous to thicken a pint of milk, or a pint of water, with a little butter and flour, and then call it butter sauce or melted butter. Suppose we have a large white cabbage, like those met with in the West of England, and we are going to make a meal off it in conjunction with plenty of bread. Suppose the cabbage is sufficiently large for six persons, surely half a pound of butter is not an excessive quantity to use in making butter sauce for the purpose. Yet prejudice is such that if we use half a pound of butter for the butter sauce, housekeepers consider it extravagant. On the other hand, if the butter were placed on the table, and the six persons helped themselves, and ate bread and butter with the cabbage and finished the half-pound, it would not be considered extravagant. Of course, this is simply prejudice.

A simple way of making melted butter is as follows:—Take half a pint of cold water, put it in a saucepan, and add sufficient white roux, or butter and flour mixed, till it is of the consistency of thin gruel. Now gradually dissolve in this, adding a little piece at a time, as much butter as you can afford; add a suspicion of nutmeg, a little pepper and salt, and a few drops of lemon-juice from a fresh lemon, if you have one in use.

Butter, Melted, or Oiled Butter.—Melted butter, properly speaking, is rarely met with in this country, but is a common everyday sauce on the Continent. It is simply what it says. A piece of butter is placed in a little sauce-boat and placed in the oven till the butter runs to oil, and then sent to table with all kinds of fish with which in our present work we have nothing to do; but it is also sent to table with all kinds of vegetables, such as French artichokes, &c.; sometimes a spoonful of French capers is added to the oiled butter.