Skip to main content
Sauce

White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with milk, butter, cream, mushrooms, onion, carrot, sweet herbs, pepper, salt, cloves, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Cut the mushrooms, onion, and carrot into pieces.

  2. Combine them with the milk, sweet herbs, whole pepper, salt, cloves, and mace in a saucepan.

  3. Gently simmer for about an hour.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the butter and stir over heat until the sauce thickens.

  2. Finish by stirring in the cream.

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 + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 that the sauce is built on and infuses with the aromatics.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping give the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Cream
Adds richness and body, softening the sauce's flavour at the end.
Mushrooms
Contribute savoury, earthy flavour to the infused milk.
Onion
Contributes savoury sweetness and aroma as it simmers in the milk.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter over heat until the sauce thickens. Milk thickens only gradually and can scorch or form lumps if heated too hard. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly so the sauce thickens evenly without sticking to the pan.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, mushroom, onion, carrot, pepper, clove, butter):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, mushroom, onion, carrot, pepper, clove, 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.

More white sauce recipes

English 22Turnips in 20Fish in 17for Poultry 12Cauliflower in 11Lemon 9 See all 309 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes