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White Sauce

A basic white sauce made from milk and corn flour, optionally flavored with butter, eggs, anchovy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and other ingredients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Pour 1 pint of milk into an enamelled saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. In a small bowl, blend 1 tablespoon of corn flour with a little cold milk or water until smooth.

  3. Once the milk is near boiling, add the blended corn flour and stir until thickened.

  4. Continue to cook until the raw taste of the flour disappears.

Flavor and vary

  1. For added flavor, stir in a piece of butter, or mix in optional ingredients like hard-boiled eggs, anchovy sauce, or Worcestershire sauce.

  2. To make variations, add boiled celery, onions, or parsley, or use button mushrooms or capers.

  3. For a savory sauce, simmer a slice of ham with a blade of mace, pepper, and salt.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Anchovy + saucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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 that the thickened sauce is built on.
Corn flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Cooking until the raw taste disappears. Corn flour must be cooked after it thickens, or the sauce tastes starchy and raw. Stirring it into near-boiling milk and cooking it through lets the starch swell fully and the raw flavor cook off.

“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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