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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by melting butter with flour and water, 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. Work 2 teaspoons of flour thoroughly into ¼ pound of butter to avoid lumps.

  2. Add 5 teaspoons of cold water and set the mixture in boiling water until it melts.

  3. When it begins to simmer, it is done.

  4. Do not place it directly on the stove, to avoid frying the butter.

Serve

  1. If serving with fish, add finely chopped hard-boiled eggs.

  2. If serving with boiled fowl, add oysters while simmering until heated.

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
Melts to form the body and rich flavor of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter so it stays smooth rather than separating.
Cold water
Adds moisture and keeps the butter from frying as it heats.

The step that matters

Heating the butter slowly in boiling water. Direct heat on the stove can fry the butter and make it separate or brown, so gentle indirect heat keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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