Sauces and Gravies: The Twentieth Century

Several cookery books devoted to sauces, including One Hundred and One Sauces (1906) by May E. Southworth, The Book of Sauces (1915) by C. Herman Senn, and Soups, Sauces and Gravies (1939) by Cora, Rose, and Bob Brown continued efforts to translate “fancy” French sauces into the American vernacular. Only one sauce met with widespread acceptance: the roux-based white sauce, modeled on a debased béchamel, that had started as the darling of Fannie Farmer and the home economics movement. The most wretched form of white sauce surfaced in works such as Good Meals and How to Prepare Them (1927) by the Good Housekeeping Institute. Savory sauces were formularized in a chart for a “thin, medium or thick” white sauce made with milk, flour, and butter. With only a few seasoning variations, blandness reigned. In A Book of Menus with Recipes (1936), the cookbook author Della T. Lutes thought it no wonder that men cynically likened white sauce to “library paste gone wrong.”