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Sauce

Drawn-butter Sauce

A sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, and gradually stirring in boiling water until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Drawn-butter Sauce

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 ↓

Drawn-butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir until combined.

  3. Gradually add the boiling water while shaking the saucepan continuously.

  4. Allow the sauce to simmer gently until it thickens, but do not let it boil.

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 + 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
Provides the fat base, rich flavor and smooth mouthfeel of the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Its starch thickens the sauce as it heats in the liquid and fat.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid of the sauce and hydrates the flour so it thickens evenly.

The step that matters

Simmer gently without boiling. Flour starch thickens as it heats, but a hard boil can break the butter and water emulsion, leaving the sauce greasy and grainy.

“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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