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Sauce

Brown or Spanish Sauce

A brown sauce made with butter, flour, stock, and optional caramel or kitchen bouquet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown or Spanish Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and cook together, stirring constantly until it turns brown.

  3. Once browned, gradually add the stock while stirring continuously.

  4. For a richer color, add a few drops of caramel or burnt sugar, or 1 teaspoon of kitchen bouquet.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and stock, giving it body.
Butter
Melts to form the fat base in which the flour is cooked and browned.
Consomme or brown soup stock
Liquid that hydrates the cooked flour, turning the roux into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until brown. Flour must be stirred constantly while it browns so it colors evenly without scorching. Scorched flour gives a bitter taste, and the stock should be added only once the roux has reached the intended color.

“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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