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Sauce

Drawn Butter Sauce

A sauce made by mixing butter, flour, and boiling water, heated until near boiling and served immediately.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Drawn Butter Sauce

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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the butter and flour together until creamy.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Heat until it reaches the boiling point, but do not boil.

  4. Serve immediately.

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. 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
Provides fat and rich flavour, and gives the sauce its creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by binding with the butter and water as it heats.

The step that matters

Heat until it reaches the boiling point, but do not boil.. Flour thickens best when the mixture heats through to near boiling. Boiling the sauce further can break the emulsion of butter and water, leaving it greasy and thin.

“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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