Skip to main content
Sauce

Mustard Cream

A creamy mustard sauce made with milk, butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Mustard Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a double boiler.

  2. In a bowl, beat the butter, flour, and mustard until creamy.

  3. Gradually pour the hot milk into the butter mixture, a little at a time, while mixing well.

  4. Return the mixture to the boiler, add salt and pepper, and boil for three minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with baked crabs or roast clams.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Its starch thickens the liquid as the sauce heats, giving it body.
Mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the hot milk gradually. Flour starch clumps when a hot liquid hits it all at once. Pouring the milk in slowly while mixing keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Mixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes