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Sauce

Melted Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made by melting butter with flour, milk, lemon, cayenne, pepper, and salt.

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

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 ↓

Melted Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, rub the flour into the butter until smooth.

  2. Place the saucepan on the fire and slowly add the milk, blending well.

  3. Allow the mixture to come to a boil, then season with pepper and salt.

  4. Serve immediately.

Alternative finish

  1. For an alternative, heat desired quantity of butter in an enamelled saucepan until frothy.

  2. Add a squeeze of lemon and a little cayenne, then serve in a sauce tureen.

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. 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
Provides richness and the fat base that carries the sauce's flavour and smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth, lightly bound sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.

The step that matters

Blending the flour into the butter until smooth. Rubbing the flour fully into the butter before adding liquid prevents lumps, because flour clumps when it meets hot liquid without first being coated in fat.

Swap the lemon

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

  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, milk, pepper. 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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