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Drawn Butter

A sauce made by mixing butter, flour, and cold water, then heating until melted and simmering, optionally flavored with eggs or oysters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Fish and oyster work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 496 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour with the butter until smooth and lump-free.

  2. Add the cold water.

  3. Place the mixture in a double boiler.

  4. Heat until the mixture melts and begins to simmer.

  5. Remove from heat.

Finish for serving

  1. If serving with fish, stir in finely chopped hard boiled eggs.

  2. If serving with boiled fowl, add oysters.

  3. Heat through.

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. Fish + oystertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

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

  2. Butter + fishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,488 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Egg + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Provides fat and rich flavour, and melts to form the body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter as it heats, giving the sauce a smooth, coating body.
Cold water
Loosens the flour-butter paste so it blends smoothly before heating.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with the butter until lump-free. Flour clumps if it meets liquid or heat unevenly. Working it smoothly into the fat first lets starch granules separate and thicken the sauce evenly, 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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