Skip to main content
Main

Plain White Sauce

A simple sauce made from arrowroot, milk, salt, and butter, simmered until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Plain White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, gradually mix the arrowroot with the milk.

  2. Pour the mixture into a small clean saucepan and add salt.

  3. Stir continuously over medium heat until it boils, then cook for 1-2 minutes.

  4. Gradually add the butter in small pieces, stirring until fully dissolved.

Serve

  1. 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.

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. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Arrowroot + buttertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it heats and boils.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the arrowroot thickens.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel as it melts into the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the arrowroot into cold milk. Starch clumps if added to hot liquid, so it must be fully dispersed in cold milk first. Stirring while heating keeps the starch granules separated so they thicken evenly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

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.

You might also like

Arrowroot GruelArrowroot Gruel37 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes