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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by blending butter, flour, and boiling water, simmered until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the butter and flour together in a bowl until smooth.

  2. Bring the boiling water to a simmer in a saucepan.

  3. Stir the butter mixture into the water until perfectly smooth.

  4. Let the mixture simmer for 15 minutes, stirring frequently.

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).

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, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the water. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly. Blending it smooth first lets the starch disperse and swell evenly, so the sauce 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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