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Mustard Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mustard Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour mixed with mustard and stir well.

  3. Gradually add the milk, salt, and pepper while stirring continuously; bring to a boil and cook for 3 minutes.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice or vinegar.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. 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 flavour, and helps form the base roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Mustard
Provides the sharp, pungent flavour that defines the sauce.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the butter and milk.

The step that matters

Gradually add the milk while stirring continuously. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps. Bringing it to a boil then cooking briefly activates the starch fully, giving the sauce its final body.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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

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