Skip to main content
Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by mixing butter and flour, then boiling in water until melted and simmering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. In a bowl, mix the butter and flour until combined.

  2. Set the mixture in a larger pot of boiling water.

  3. Shake constantly until melted and simmering.

  4. Allow to boil once, then remove from heat.

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
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated, giving it body.

The step that matters

Allow to boil once, then remove from heat. Bringing the sauce to a single boil lets the flour starch swell and thicken it fully. Holding it at a rolling boil for longer can make the butter fat separate, leaving the sauce greasy and grainy.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes