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Sauce

Another Way of Preparing Drawn Butter

A sauce made by mixing flour with boiling water and then adding butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Another Way of Preparing Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make a thin batter with the flour.

  2. Stir the batter into the boiling water in a saucepan.

  3. Let it boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and add the butter pieces.

  5. Keep hot until the butter is melted.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the water into a light, smooth sauce that helps the butter cling and stay blended.
Butter
Provides rich fat and flavor, forming the body of the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter off the heat. Butter added to a boiling mixture can separate and turn greasy. Removing the pan from heat lets the butter melt gently and stay emulsified in the thickened liquid.

“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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