Skip to main content
Main

Drawn Butter or Sauce for Fish

A buttery sauce thickened with flour and water, served over chopped hard‑boiled egg and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Drawn Butter or Sauce for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the hard-boiled egg and place it in a sauce tureen.

  2. In a bowl, mix the butter, flour, and salt until creamy.

  3. Gradually moisten the mixture with hot water.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the mixture to the saucepan with the remaining boiling water over heat.

  2. Cook until the sauce thickens smoothly.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the chopped egg.

  2. Stir gently.

  3. Garnish with small bits of parsley.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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
Melts to form the rich fat base that carries the sauce's flavour and smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and water into a smooth, cohesive sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds body and savoury richness as the chopped egg is folded into the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until the sauce thickens smoothly. Flour must be fully dispersed before heating; if lumps form or the sauce is undercooked, the starch will not thicken evenly and the sauce will taste raw and pasty.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes