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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A buttery sauce made by drawing flour into boiling water and adding butter, optionally with eggs, capers, or curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with cold water until smooth.

  2. Pour the mixture into ⅔ pint of boiling water, stirring briskly until it boils.

  3. Remove from heat but keep warm.

  4. Add the butter pieces and stir until melted.

  5. If the sauce has lumps, strain it through a small sieve.

Add optional flavours

  1. For fish, add hard boiled eggs or capers.

  2. To make curry sauce, sprinkle in a little curry powder.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot water.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the flour mixture to boiling water while stirring briskly. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly. Stirring briskly as it goes in disperses the starch so it thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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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