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Creamed Dishes and Gravies

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, and milk, combined with cooked vegetables, eggs, or meat, optionally finished with cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and celery work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 488 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Creamed Dishes and Gravies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan without browning it.

  2. Blend the flour with the melted butter.

  3. Carefully add the milk while stirring constantly.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and begins to boil.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the sauce with your choice of cooked vegetables, hard-cooked eggs, or chopped meat or fish.

  2. For a richer flavor, add grated cheese to the sauce 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. Cauliflower + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together488 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  4. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  5. Cauliflower + potatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that thickens as it heats.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, and carries the flour into a smooth roux.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce as its starch swells with heat.
Grated cheese
Adds savory flavor and richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the milk into the roux. Adding milk while stirring constantly keeps the flour evenly dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps. Starch swells as the mixture heats, so it needs to be kept moving until it thickens and begins to boil.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, cauliflower, potato, egg, meat):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, cauliflower, potato, egg, meat. 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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