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White Sauce

A basic milk-based sauce thickened with corn flour, optionally flavored with butter, eggs, anchovy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, or 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. When the milk is near boiling, add the blended corn flour and stir until thickened.

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

Flavor and customize

  1. For added flavor, stir in a piece of butter, if desired.

  2. To customize, add ingredients like chopped hard-boiled eggs, anchovy sauce, or Worcestershire sauce.

  3. For mushroom sauce, stew button mushrooms in the milk.

  4. For caper sauce, add stewed capers, or substitute half the milk with water from boiled mutton.

  5. For a savory white 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 thickens into the sauce's body.
Corn flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the corn flour to the milk. Corn flour clumps if dropped into hot milk dry or unblended. Blending it smooth with cold liquid first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens without lumps.

“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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