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Dessert

Dbawn Butter

A butter mixture flavored with flour, cold water, and optional boiled eggs, capers, or oysters, simmered gently.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,024 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dbawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub 2 teaspoons of flour into ¼ pound of butter.

  2. Add 5 tablespoons of cold water.

  3. Set the mixture into boiling water and heat until it begins to simmer.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + oystertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  4. Egg + oystertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,103 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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
Provides fat and richness, giving the mixture a smooth, creamy body.
Flour
Its starch thickens the mixture as it heats, giving it body.
Cold water
Supplies the liquid that combines with the flour and butter into a smooth mixture.

The step that matters

Heat until it just begins to simmer. Flour starch thickens as it heats, so the mixture needs enough heat to thicken. Boiling hard or overheating can make the butter separate out of the mixture, so heat only until it begins to simmer.

Swap the capers

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

  1. Capersthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, oyster. 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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