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Sauce

Butter Sauce, Simple

A simple white sauce made from butter, flour, hot water, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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, Simple

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a small, thick saucepan (use marble or iron, not tin).

  2. Stir in the flour and let it bubble for about one minute until it turns a fine yellow.

  3. Pour in the hot water and add the salt, stirring continuously.

  4. Substitute milk for water to make a simple white sauce.

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. 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
Melts to carry fat and flavour through the sauce and enrich its taste.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in liquid.
Hot water
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Pour in the hot water while stirring continuously. Flour starch must be dispersed evenly in the liquid before it swells. Adding the liquid gradually while stirring constantly keeps the starch from clumping into lumps, so the sauce thickens smoothly.

“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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