Skip to main content
Sauce

Juste Catsups E Deaavx Butteb

A simple sauce made by mixing butter, flour, water, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Juste Catsups E Deaavx Butteb

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, rub the butter with the flour until well mixed.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and add the water and salt.

  3. Cover the saucepan and place it in a larger pot of boiling water.

  4. Shake the saucepan constantly until the mixture is completely melted and begins to boil.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the body and rich flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Water
Adds moisture so the butter and flour blend into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Shaking the saucepan constantly while it melts. Constant shaking keeps the butter and flour moving so they emulsify evenly and do not scorch or separate on the hot bottom of the pan. Stirring or shaking in a water bath also heats the mixture gently, which helps prevent the sauce from breaking.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More butter sauce recipes

Drawn 103Melted 103Lemon 58Parsley 30Black 23Brown 13 See all 80 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes