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Sauce

Butter Sauce

A sauce made from flour, butter, water, salt, egg yolks, cream, lemon juice, and butter, thickened and finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Butter Sauce

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Mix the flour with the melted butter.

  2. Dilute the mixture with boiling water and add salt.

  3. Stir briskly to combine without boiling.

Finish and strain

  1. Add the egg yolks mixed with cream and lemon juice.

  2. Rub the sauce through a sieve.

  3. Finish with the fresh butter, ensuring it does not boil after thickening.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling in liquid and giving it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it a smooth, rich texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce's flavour and texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness.

The step that matters

Finish with the fresh butter without boiling. Egg yolks thicken at high heat but can scramble or curdle if the sauce boils. Once thickened, keeping the sauce below boiling preserves its smooth, emulsified texture.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, egg, cream):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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

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