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Cream Sauce

A buttery sauce thickened with flour, seasoned with salt and cayenne, enriched with cream and finished with lemon juice.

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

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Dredge in the flour and shake until combined.

  3. Add salt and cayenne pepper, then stir in the cream.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce heat and let it simmer for 5 minutes.

  5. Stir in a little lemon juice 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.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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 and adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as the mixture heats.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and gives it a rich, smooth texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering after the cream is added. Flour thickens only as it heats in the liquid, so the sauce needs enough gentle simmering to cook out the raw flour taste and reach its full thickness. Boiling hard or scorching the cream can cause it to separate or stick.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, cream. 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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