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Sauce

Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made from butter, flour, and water, thickened by cooking and served warm.

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

Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until the mixture is lightly browned.

  3. Gradually add the water, stirring constantly until the sauce thickens.

  4. Serve immediately or keep warm by placing the saucepan in a bowl of hot water.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Adds fat and flavour, and enriches the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with fat and liquid.
Water
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the water to the flour mixture. Adding liquid gradually while stirring constantly keeps the flour dispersed, which prevents lumps and lets the sauce thicken smoothly as the starch swells with heat.

“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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