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Sauce

Butter, Melted, or Oiled Butter

A thin butter sauce made with water, roux, butter, and seasonings, served warm with vegetables or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Butter, Melted, or Oiled Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine ½ cup cold water and enough white roux to achieve a thin gruel consistency.

  2. Gradually add ½ pound of butter, a little at a time, until fully melted.

  3. Season with a pinch of nutmeg, a little pepper, and ¼ teaspoon salt.

  4. Add a few drops of lemon juice if available.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with vegetables or fish.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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

White roux
Flour and butter thicken the water into a smooth, thin gruel that gives the sauce body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and melts into the liquid to give the sauce a silky texture.

The step that matters

Adding the butter gradually. Butter is an emulsion of fat and water. Adding it a little at a time while the sauce is warm lets it melt and blend in smoothly. Adding it all at once can cause the fat to separate and leave the sauce greasy.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Raisinfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, nutmeg, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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