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Sauce

Drawn Butter Sauce

A butter and flour sauce thickened with boiling water, seasoned with salt, paprika, and lemon, finished with butter pieces.

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

Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Drawn Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan without browning it.

  2. Add the flour and stir until smooth.

  3. Slowly add the boiling water, stirring until the mixture thickens.

  4. Season with salt, paprika, and lemon juice.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the pieces of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled fish, asparagus, or cauliflower.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. 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
Forms the fat base of the roux and adds richness to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and boiling water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce.

The step that matters

Heat the butter without browning it. Browned butter gives a nutty, darker colour and flavour that changes the pale, clean taste of a drawn butter sauce. Gentle heat lets the butter melt and combine smoothly with the flour.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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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