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Sauce

Drawn Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made by melting butter, whisking in flour, adding water or stock, and finishing with butter, pepper, salt, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Drawn 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 ↓

Drawn Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter.

  2. Stir in 1 tablespoon of flour until smooth.

  3. Add 1 cup of water or white stock and cook until thickened.

  4. Stir in 1 tablespoon of butter in small pieces.

  5. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled or baked fish, adding lemon juice if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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, giving it a rich flavour and smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and water or stock into a smooth sauce.
Water or white stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until smooth. Cooking flour into melted butter before adding liquid forms a roux. Stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed so the sauce thickens without lumps.

“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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