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Sauce

Drawn Butter, or Melted Butter

A mixture of butter, flour, and cold water heated until melted and simmering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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, or Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the flour into the butter until well combined.

  2. Add the cold water and mix thoroughly.

  3. Place the mixture in a bowl over boiling water.

  4. Heat until it melts and begins to simmer, 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
Provides the fat that forms the rich, golden base of the sauce.
Flour
Helps bind the butter and keeps the sauce from separating as it heats.
Cold water
Adds moisture and helps the butter emulsify into a smooth, pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Heating over boiling water. Gentle indirect heat melts the butter without scorching the milk solids. If it simmers too hard or sits too long, the emulsion can break and the sauce turns greasy.

“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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