Skip to main content
Main

Thin White Sauce

A thin white sauce made by melting fat, whisking in flour, adding cold milk, and cooking until it boils.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Thin White Sauce

Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Thin White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the fat in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour.

Thicken the milk

  1. Quickly add the cold milk while stirring constantly.

  2. Continue stirring until the sauce boils.

  3. Cook gently for three minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour's starch thickens as the sauce heats.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated in liquid, thickening the sauce into a smooth body.
Fat
Coats the flour to form a roux, adding richness and helping keep the starch smooth.

The step that matters

Adding the cold milk. Flour starch clumps when it meets liquid unevenly. Adding the cold milk quickly while stirring constantly coats and disperses the starch, so it thickens smoothly as the sauce heats.

“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.

More white sauce recipes

English 22Turnips in 20Fish in 17for Poultry 12Cauliflower in 11Lemon 9 See all 309 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes