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Sauce

Cream Sauce

A simple sauce made by boiling sweetened milk or cream, adding butter and nutmeg, and thickening to desired consistency.

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

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the sweetened milk or cream in a saucepan.

  2. Add the butter and a little nutmeg.

  3. Thicken the sauce to your desired consistency and serve.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweetened milk or cream
Forms the body of the sauce and provides richness and sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother mouthfeel and a rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce to your desired consistency. Milk and cream thicken as water evaporates and their proteins and fats concentrate. Heating too hard or too long can scorch the dairy or cause it to break, so check the texture often and remove the pan once it reaches the desired consistency.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Macefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter. 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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