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Sauce

Mustard Sauce

A mustard sauce made with mustard flour, milk, salt, vinegar, butter, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a cup, mix the mustard flour with a little milk and salt.

  2. Add more milk and vinegar, stirring until thickened.

  3. For the second method, combine mustard flour, baked flour, and butter in a saucepan.

  4. Add boiling water and boil the mixture.

  5. Finish with vinegar before serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Mustard flour
Provides the sharp mustard flavour and thickens the sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Milk
Adds moisture and body, helping the sauce become smooth and creamy.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce as you add liquid. Starch in the flour needs heat and steady stirring to swell and gelatinize. Adding liquid too fast or stopping the stirring can leave lumps or a thin sauce that never fully thickens.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, vinegar, butter. 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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