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Drawn Butter Sauce

A thick, buttery sauce made by whisking flour into melted butter and adding hot water, then finishing with more butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Drawn Butter Sauce

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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt half of the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Gradually add the hot water while stirring rapidly until thickened.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture is perfectly smooth.

  5. Add the remaining butter in small pieces and stir until absorbed.

  6. Stir in the salt and pepper.

  7. Strain if not smooth.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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 and rich flavour that forms the body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the hot water, giving it body.
Hot water
Hydrates the flour so it gelatinises and forms a smooth, thickened base.

The step that matters

Adding the hot water to the flour and butter. Water must be added gradually while stirring rapidly; adding it all at once or stirring too little causes lumps, because flour clumps when hit by liquid before it disperses. Continued stirring then cooks out the raw flour taste and smooths the starch.

“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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