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White Sauce

A creamy white sauce made with butter, ham, flour, stock, mushrooms, carrots, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a pan.

  2. Gently fry ham without letting it discolor.

  3. Stir in flour.

  4. Pour in white stock.

  5. Add chopped mushrooms and carrots.

  6. Stir until sauce boils.

Simmer and finish

  1. Reduce heat.

  2. Cover partially.

  3. Simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  4. Skim off fat.

  5. Strain sauce through a fine sieve.

  6. Stir in cream.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mushroom + carrottop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,796 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 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 with fat and carries flavour from the pan into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the fat.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty meat flavour to the sauce.
Button mushrooms
Contribute earthy flavour and body as they soften during simmering.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder texture at the end.

The step that matters

Stir in flour and bring the sauce to a boil. Flour must be cooked with the fat and stirred while the liquid heats, otherwise it clumps. Boiling and then simmering gently lets the starch swell fully and thicken evenly.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, ham, flour, mushroom, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ham, flour, mushroom, cream. 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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