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Sauce

Melted Butter, Sometimes Called Drawn Butter

A sauce base made by melting butter with flour and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Eliza Leslie · From a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and flour work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 449 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Melted Butter, Sometimes Called Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Have a covered sauce-pan lined with porcelain.

  2. Take a quarter pound of fresh butter, cut it, and mix with about two teaspoons of flour.

  3. When thoroughly mixed, put the mixture into the sauce-pan and add four tablespoons of cold water.

Melt and simmer

  1. Cover the sauce-pan and place it in a large tin pan of boiling water.

  2. Shake it round continually until it is entirely melted and begins to simmer.

  3. Let it rest until it boils up.

By Eliza Leslie. Recipe from a historical cookbook (Project Gutenberg).

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. See the original page.

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. Tea + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together449 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter (in the method)
Provides fat that melts into a rich, smooth sauce with a buttery flavour.
Flour
Starch thickens the melted butter and water as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Shaking while the butter melts. Constant shaking keeps the butter and flour evenly dispersed and heats the mixture gently in the water bath. This helps the sauce melt smoothly and stops it scorching or separating into greasy layers.

“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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