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Dutch Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, milk, vinegar, mustard, salt, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Dutch Sauce

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Dutch Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour until well blended.

  3. Gradually add the milk and boil for three minutes.

  4. Add the vinegar, mustard, salt, and egg yolks.

  5. Stir until thickened, but do not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Enriches the sauce and carries flavor while forming the base roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with the butter as a roux.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat and add richness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the yolks.

The step that matters

Stir until thickened, but do not boil. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heating, and boiling can curdle or scramble them, leaving a grainy sauce instead of a smooth one.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, vinegar, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, vinegar, egg. 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.

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