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Sauce

Plain White Sauce, and Cream Sauce

A simple sauce made by melting butter, whisking in flour, and adding water, with an optional substitution of milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Plain White Sauce, and Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Stir in the flour to make a smooth paste.

  3. Slowly add the water while stirring continuously.

  4. Cook until the sauce thickens; if too thin, cook longer.

  5. For cream sauce, substitute water with milk or cream.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Adds fat and rich flavor to the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as it cooks into a smooth paste.
Water
Forms the liquid that the flour thickens into sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour to make a smooth paste. Flour clumps if added to liquid unevenly. Cooking it into the melted butter first coats each grain with fat, so the starch disperses smoothly when the liquid is added.

“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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