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Monday 26^th November 2007

I’ve become quite a fan of the ‘cook far more than you intend to eat and freeze it’ school of thought since I’ve been living in a house with a hob, an oven, a freezer and a microwave. Tonight, I planned to make a cheese roux sauce, enabling us to eat macaroni cheese this evening and then use the rest to engulf some pasta or perhaps vegetables in cheesiness later in the week. My plan involved making a whole 250 g block of cheddar’s worth of cheese sauce. Unfortunately, having only made roux by eye and guesswork in the past, I had no idea how much flour and butter to kick things off with to get a result of the correct consistency. Not to worry, I thought: enter the Internet. Google wasn’t much help initially:

Dairy-Free Zone

Cheese sauce is one of the trickier things to do without dairy products…

swallowtail.org/nondairy/cheese_sauce.shtml - 4k

This fact did not particularly surprise me. Eventually, however, I did manage to find a recipe for cheese sauce involving dairy products. I discounted the parmesan and the other poncy stuff, averaged the quantities with a few other recipes I’d seen on the way, and decided that three ounces of flour, and an equal quantity of butter, should be about right.

The trouble is, despite having hob, oven, freezer and microwave, one thing our kitchen lacks is a pair of scales. This isn’t too big a problem for butter, which comes in lovely cuboidal pats of a specified weight and is just asking to be cut into appropriate fractional slices for given cooking task, but flour would probably prove more challenging. However, the Internet told me that flour weighs 500 g/l, and that a tablespoon is just under 15 ml and so, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation later, it would be a simple matter to scoop out around ten tablespoons of flour and proceed. One super-nerdy mass–volume converter told me that I should use 11.34 UK tablespoons (I hadn’t realised that we have a national standard spoon—more usual practice would be to have a US tablespoon and then one that the rest of the World uses—which is presumably about half the size).

So, I measured out ten tablespoons, having left my 0.34 UK tablespoons spoon in my other trousers. This seemed to fill about half a cereal bowl, and looked to me to be more flour than I’d ever seen in my entire life, give or take a bit. Concerned, I sent my mum an instant message. After much speculation about whether or not to use the half-a-cereal-bowlful of flour I’d measured out, she decided to weigh a tablespoon of flour for me. The ‘slightly heaped’ spoonful apparently weighed about an ounce. So I’d only need three, not ten, to make up my cheesy, rouxy goodness.

I don’t know what caused this discrepancy; perhaps Mum was using heavy flour (though radioactive isotopes of normal flour are probably against some EU directive or other), or perhaps she had balanced a huge mound of flour into the ‘slightly heaped’ tablespoonful, run across the kitchen in egg-and-spoon race style, and weighed the teetering mass of ground grain. Perhaps a Shropshire tablespoon is larger than the normal UK ones. Somehow, none of these implausible explanations seemed plausible, and it rattled me. The Internet…wrong?

This tale has a disappointingly happy ending, unfortunately—unsure and confused, I scooped out some of the flour, leaving an unhappy compromise amount somewhere between six and seven tablespoons to cook with. I made the sauce with all the wrong quantities of stuff. But it turned out fine. No glue or wallpaper paste, no thin, watery, barely-cheesy milk, no horrible lumpy mess like the vomit from a customer who has just stumbled, over-full, out of an all-you-can-eat dairy; just smooth, delicious, slightly peppery cheese sauce in exactly the right quantity to eat half now and freeze the other half for later.

I am the god of cheese sauce. Though I wish I had a better superpower.

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