Skip to main content
Dessert

Drawn Butter

A sauce made from butter, flour, water, herbs, and chopped hard‑boiled eggs.

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

Why it works: Parsley and marjoram match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,979 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine butter and flour, beating until creamy.

  2. Add salt.

  3. Pour in boiling water while stirring constantly, avoiding boiling.

  4. For variations, add herbs to boiling water before mixing in.

  5. Finally, stir in the chopped hard boiled eggs.

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. Parsley + marjoramtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,979 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Mint + marjoramtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together94 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + minttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,198 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Flour + marjoramtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,265 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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
Provides fat and richness, giving the sauce its smooth, creamy body.
Flour
Thickens the butter as it is beaten, helping the sauce hold together and become creamy.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and a mild, rich flavor when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Pour in boiling water while stirring constantly, avoiding boiling. Adding the water gradually while stirring keeps the butter and flour emulsified into a smooth sauce instead of separating or lumping. Keeping the sauce below a boil prevents the emulsion from breaking and the butter from separating out.

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, parsley, marjoram, egg):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, parsley, marjoram, egg. 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

Mint JellyMint Jelly22 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes