A white sauceboat of pale drawn butter sauce with chopped parsley, some poured over a piece of boiled white fish on a white plate with two small boiled potatoes, on a linen tablecloth. — Drawn butter sauce over boiled fish.

Drawn Butter Sauce (1918)

Name: Drawn Butter Sauce
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 15 min
Cuisine: American
Ingredients: 3 tbsp stick margarine for the sauce; ¼ cup all-purpose flour; ½ tsp salt; ⅛ tsp cayenne pepper; 1½ cups boiling water; 2 tbsp stick margarine to finish, cold, in small pieces; 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

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Drawn butter sauce from a First World War cookbook of 1918: a plain white sauce for fish and vegetables made with margarine in place of butter, sharpened with cayenne and parsley, the last of the fat stirred in just before serving.

By The Forgotten MenuPublished Oct 22, 2026

Recipe makes: About 1¾ cups, for 6
Prep: 5 min
Cook: 10 min
Total: 15 min

Have the water boiling before you start the roux. The sauce is best made just before the fish or vegetables are ready.

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Drawn butter sauce over boiled fish.

The story behind the recipe

Drawn butter is an old sauce: butter and flour cooked together, thinned with hot water, and finished with more butter just before it went to the table. In 1918 C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. Goudiss printed it in Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them under the old name, with no butter in it. The first line of their recipe is “butter substitute.”

The same sauce, twenty-two years apart

Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gave the butter version in 1896: a third of a cup of butter, three tablespoons of flour, a cup and a half of hot water, salt and pepper. “Boil five minutes, and add remaining butter in small pieces. To be served with boiled or baked fish.” The Goudisses’ version has the same shape and finish, a third of a cup of fat with two tablespoons held back “to add just before serving.” It changes the fat, adds cayenne and parsley, and says only “Make as white sauce.”

The Goudisses wanted margarine on grown-ups’ plates so that the butter could go to the children, and the sauce shows how little else had to change. Neither recipe has milk in it; drawn butter is a water sauce. Their book reckoned that if each of the country’s 20 million households scraped a quarter ounce of butter off its plates every day, the waste would come to over 114 million pounds a year.

Making it today

We use stick margarine, the closest thing on a shop shelf to their “butter substitute”; with butter it becomes Farmer’s sauce again. Their cup of water to a quarter cup of flour makes a thick sauce, so we use a cup and a half, the liquid in the Goudisses’ own white sauce and in Farmer’s drawn butter, for a sauce that pours. The cooking time is Farmer’s.

Why Did Butter Make Margarine Expensive? tells how the tax on colored margarine reached the Supreme Court. Pour this over boiled fish, as Farmer did, or over boiled potatoes, carrots or cauliflower; the same book’s Hard Sauce (1918) uses the same butter substitute for dessert.

⅓ cup butter substitute ...

C. Houston Goudiss and Alberta M. GoudissFoods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them (New York: World Syndicate Company, 1918), Drawn Butter Sauce, p. 95

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Ingredients

For about 1¾ cups, for 6. Quantities are shown as written.

Quantities as written here, for about 1¾ cups, for 6.

Stick margarine for the sauce3 tbsp
All-purpose flour1/4 cup
Salt1/2 tsp
Cayenne pepper1/8 tsp
Boiling water1 1/2 cups
Stick margarine to finish, cold, in small pieces2 tbsp
Chopped fresh parsley2 tbsp

Ingredients as written here

3 tbsp stick margarine for the sauce
¼ cup all-purpose flour
½ tsp salt
⅛ tsp cayenne pepper
1½ cups boiling water
2 tbsp stick margarine to finish, cold, in small pieces
2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Equipment

Small heavy saucepan
Whisk
Kettle for boiling water

Instructions

Melt the stick margarine for the sauce in the saucepan over medium-low heat. Whisk in the flour, salt and cayenne and cook, whisking, for 1 to 2 minutes, until the mixture bubbles but has not browned.
Pour in about a third of the boiling water, whisking hard until smooth, then whisk in the rest a little at a time.
Bring to a boil and let it bubble gently for 5 minutes, whisking often, until it is smooth and coats the back of a spoon.
Take the pan off the heat. Whisk in the stick margarine to finish, a piece at a time, then stir in the parsley. Taste for salt and serve at once.

Nutrition

105calories per serving

Recipe makes: About 1¾ cups, for 6
Servings: 6

Estimated per serving from USDA FoodData Central values for the listed ingredients.

Recipe notes

When adjusting quantities

Keep the flour at about 2½ tablespoons to each cup of water for a sauce that pours.

Notes

Quantities mentioned in these notes don’t change when you adjust the servings.

For the sauce as printed, use 1 cup of water; it will be thick. If the sauce thickens while it waits, whisk in a spoonful of hot water. Farmer’s 1896 version uses butter, black pepper in place of cayenne, and no parsley, and is served with fish. Leftovers keep for 2 days in the refrigerator; reheat gently, whisking, with a little hot water. Contains wheat; many margarines contain milk.

Scaling changes the ingredients only; pan sizes and cooking times need their own judgment. To adapt this recipe further, try the recipe tool at TuneMyRecipe (opens in a new tab), our sister site.