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Sauce

To Make Drawn Butter Sauce

A sauce made by creaming butter and flour, then adding hot water until boiling, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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To Make Drawn Butter Sauce

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 ↓

To Make Drawn Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the butter and flour together.

  2. Gradually add the hot water, stirring constantly.

  3. Keep stirring until the sauce reaches a boiling point.

  4. Remove from heat and add salt to taste.

  5. Optionally, add a little lemon juice if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter
Provides fat and rich flavour, and melts into the sauce to give it body.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as it heats with the butter.
Hot water
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to a boil.

The step that matters

Add the hot water gradually while stirring constantly. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour and butter mixture smooth. Adding it all at once can trap lumps of flour that do not dissolve evenly, leaving the sauce grainy instead of silky.

“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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