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Sauce

Drawn Butter Sauces

A sauce made by melting butter or beef fat, adding flour, water, salt, pepper, and optional ingredients for variations.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Drawn Butter Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter or beef fat over medium heat until it boils.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of flour and stir as it cooks.

  3. Gradually add 1 pint of water, stirring continuously.

  4. Season with 1 teaspoon of salt and ½ teaspoon of pepper.

Finish and vary

  1. For a richer flavor, use ½ tablespoon of beef fat and add ½ tablespoon of butter just before serving.

  2. For milk sauce, substitute water with milk.

  3. For brown sauce, brown the fat and flour before adding water.

  4. To create variations, add chopped pickles and vinegar for fish sauce, or mustard for mustard sauce.

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. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 or beef fat
Carries the flavor and enriches the sauce as the base fat.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the fat and water.

The step that matters

Stirring in the water. Adding the water gradually while stirring continuously keeps the flour smooth and prevents lumps, because starch granules clump when they hit liquid without being dispersed.

“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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