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Panada or Panard

A binding sauce made from butter, flour, and liquid, used for coating cold fish or meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Panada or Panard

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the panada

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Add the flour and liquid.

  3. Stir briskly until smooth and forms a ball that leaves the sides of the pan.

Use the panada

  1. Use for binding mixtures of cold fish or cold meat when shaping and coating.

  2. If enclosing in pastry cases, use 1¾ cups liquid.

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
Fat that coats the flour, helping it blend smoothly and adding richness.
Flour
Starch that thickens the liquid and gives the paste body to bind mixtures.
Liquid
Hydrates the flour so its starch swells and thickens into a smooth, cohesive paste.

The step that matters

Stirring until the paste forms a ball. Cooking the flour paste until it pulls away from the pan drives off surplus moisture and fully swells the starch. Undercooked paste stays loose and tastes floury, so it binds poorly.

“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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