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Sauce

Universal Sauce

A thick sauce made from butter, water, flour, and burnt sugar.

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

Universal Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter slowly over low heat in the water.

  2. Stir in the flour until it forms a thick paste.

  3. Simmer for 15 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

Prepare the browning

  1. For browning, mix ½ lb fresh butter with ½ lb lump sugar in a saucepan and shake until clear brown.

  2. To brown flour, spread it on a plate and heat in the oven, turning often until desired shade is reached.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a paste and gives the sauce its body.
Sugar
Browned into the burnt sugar used for colour and a deeper, caramel flavour.

The step that matters

Simmer while stirring constantly. Flour-thickened sauces scorch easily on the base of the pan. Constant stirring spreads the heat and keeps the starch from sticking and burning, which would taste bitter and spoil the sauce.

“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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