Skip to main content
Sauce

Brown Sauce

A thickened cream sauce seasoned with salt and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Brown Sauce

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the cream in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour with a little cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the boiling cream and stir constantly until thickened.

  4. Reduce heat and cook in a double boiler for 5 to 10 minutes.

  5. Optionally, flavor the milk with onion before adding the flour.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  3. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Thin cream
Provides the liquid base and richness that the sauce is built on.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and gelatinizes when heated in the liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the flour paste to the boiling cream. Flour starch clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly. Stirring constantly disperses the paste so the starch hydrates and thickens evenly into a smooth sauce.

“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 brown sauce recipes

Stewed Cod in 12Italian 6Mushroom 6Sharp 5Pheasant in 4Piquant 4 See all 188 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipesCurry SauceCurry Sauce59 recipes