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Sauce

Drawn Butter or Sauce for Fish

A buttery sauce for fish made with butter, flour, salt, egg, water or milk, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Drawn Butter or Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the hard-boiled egg and place it in a sauce tureen.

  2. In a bowl, mix the butter, flour, and salt to a cream.

  3. Moisten the mixture with hot water.

Make the sauce

  1. Add this mixture to the ½ cup of boiling water in a saucepan over heat.

  2. Cook until the sauce thickens smoothly.

  3. Pour the sauce over the chopped egg, stir together, and add small bits of parsley.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 richness and a smooth, flavourful body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds body and a mild, savoury flavour when stirred into the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the butter mixture to boiling water. If the flour-butter paste is added to water that is not boiling, or stirred too little, it can clump instead of thickening smoothly. Keep the liquid at a steady boil while whisking so the starch gelatinises evenly and the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, milk. 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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