Skip to main content
Sauce

Sauces and Milk Soups

A thickened milk sauce made with butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sauces and Milk Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Melt the butter in a granite saucepan without browning it.

  3. Add the flour to the melted butter and stir quickly until well mixed.

  4. Gradually add the milk, stirring carefully until the mixture is smooth.

  5. Bring to a boil until the sauce thickens.

  6. Stir in the salt and white pepper.

Finish

  1. For creamed oysters, add cayenne pepper, celery salt, and lemon juice to taste.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and supplies the body that thickens as it heats.
Butter
Carries flavour and fat, and coats the flour so it blends smoothly without lumps.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid and swelling as it heats with the milk.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the roux. Flour and melted butter form a roux that must be combined smoothly before the milk goes in. Adding milk gradually and stirring keeps starch granules dispersed, which prevents lumps as the sauce thickens on heating.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, white pepper, pepper, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, white pepper, pepper, lemon. 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.

More milk sauce recipes

for Fish 6Egg 4 See all 23 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes