Skip to main content
Sauce

A Good White Sauce for Serving Over Vegetables

A simple white sauce made with butter, flour, milk, pepper, and salt, optionally finished with lemon juice or parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

A Good White Sauce for Serving Over Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour, pepper, and salt.

  3. Gradually add the milk while stirring continuously.

  4. Allow the mixture to boil for three minutes until it thickens and bubbles.

Finish and serve

  1. The sauce should be as thick as rich cream and cling to the spoon.

  2. If desired, add lemon juice or parsley before serving.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Adds richness and flavour as it melts into the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in the melted butter and milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as it heats and boils.

The step that matters

Boiling the milk mixture. Starch in the flour only swells and thickens the sauce fully once it reaches a boil. Stirring while adding the milk prevents lumps from forming, and the sauce should be kept moving to avoid scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Coconutfits less well

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

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