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Boiled Beets with White Sauce

A dish of boiled beets topped with a white sauce of butter, flour, water, and sugar.

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

Boiled Beets with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beets

  1. Boil the beets until tender.

  2. Peel and dice the beets.

  3. Season the beets with salt and pepper.

Make the white sauce

  1. In a saucepan, rub together the butter and flour.

  2. Add boiling water and sugar to the saucepan, stirring until combined.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the beets and serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

Red beets
Provide the main body, sweetness and earthy flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the sauce a smooth, mellow mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with starch as it hydrates in the hot liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the earthy taste of the beets.

The step that matters

Rubbing the butter and flour together before adding the water. Coating the flour in fat keeps it from clumping when hot water is added, so the sauce stays smooth. Stir steadily while the liquid is added so the starch can thicken evenly as it heats.

“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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