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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by mixing butter, flour, and boiling water, then heating until it boils once.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Butter a small cup.

  2. Mix flour with butter until smooth.

  3. Gradually pour in ½ pint of boiling water, stirring until dissolved.

  4. Heat on the stove and let it boil once.

  5. Avoid boiling longer to prevent oiliness.

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).

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 rich, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells and sets when heated.

The step that matters

Boil only once. Boiling too long can cause the emulsion of fat and liquid to break, so the butter separates and the sauce turns oily.

“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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