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Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, and incorporating boiling water to create a thickened sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Rub the flour into the melted butter until smooth and hot, cooking for 1 minute.

  3. Ensure the water is boiling, then pour it into the saucepan while stirring continuously.

  4. When the mixture thickens and boils, transfer it to a serving dish and serve immediately.

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).

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
Melted fat that coats the flour and carries flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Starch that thickens the liquid into a smooth, body-rich sauce when heated.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling water while stirring. Pouring the water in gradually while stirring keeps the flour and fat blended, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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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