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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made from flour, water, butter, and seasonings, thickened with optional ingredients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine flour, water, salt, and pepper in a small pan.

  2. Stir until it boils.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Add butter, cold water, and lemon juice or vinegar.

  5. Keep the sauce warm on the stove until needed.

Add optional extras

  1. Add small chopped mushrooms while boiling for a thicker sauce.

  2. Mix in chopped hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, or capers after cooking.

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. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Flour + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the water as its starch swells on heating, giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness, smooth mouthfeel, and a glossy finish.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Adding the butter off the heat. Butter added to a boiling sauce can separate and turn greasy. Removing the pan from heat first and stirring in the butter gradually keeps the fat emulsified and the sauce smooth.

Swap the cucumber

The recipe marks cucumber as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, pepper, butter, lemon, mushroom, egg, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, butter, lemon, mushroom, egg, capers. 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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