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Sauce

Drawn Butter for Fish

A buttery sauce made by blending butter, flour, and boiling water, optionally flavored with parsley.

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

Drawn Butter for Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Beat together the butter and flour until very smooth.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture, stirring quickly until smooth.

  3. Set the saucepan over the fire and let it boil once.

Add parsley and serve

  1. If desired, tie the parsley sprigs, briefly boil them, chop finely, and stir into the sauce.

  2. Garnish the dish with additional parsley sprigs before serving.

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 + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 sauce its body and smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stirring the boiling water into the butter and flour. Adding the water quickly while stirring keeps the flour dispersed, so the starch hydrates evenly and the sauce turns smooth instead of lumpy.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Parsleythe 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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