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White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, onion, carrot, celery, herbs, flour, stock, cream, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter over low heat in a frying pan.

  2. Add the chopped onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, parsley, and thyme; simmer for 10 minutes without browning.

  3. Stir in the flour until smooth and frothy.

Finish the sauce

  1. Move the pan to a cooler spot and gradually add the white stock, stirring until smooth.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, then boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Stir in the cream or milk, bring to a boil, and strain before serving.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness and flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
White stock
Forms the main liquid that the roux thickens into a sauce.
Cream or milk
Adds smoothness, richness and body to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the white stock. Adding liquid gradually to the hot roux, off the heat's full intensity, and stirring constantly lets the starch disperse evenly, preventing lumps and keeping the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, celery, parsley, thyme, flour, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, celery, parsley, thyme, flour, pepper. 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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