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Supreme Sauce

A rich sauce made from butter, flour, chicken stock, cream, lemon juice, salt, nutmeg, and finished with butter and chicken glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan.

  2. Stir in the flour and allow it to fry slightly.

  3. Gradually add the chicken stock, stirring until it boils.

  4. Simmer for fifteen minutes and remove any scum.

  5. Add the boiling cream, lemon juice, salt, and nutmeg.

  6. Strain through a cloth or napkin, then return to a clean stew pan.

  7. Finish with the fresh butter and chicken glaze.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavour, and the fresh butter added at the end gives a glossy finish.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce body when cooked briefly with the butter.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, supplying most of its savoury flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, rounder texture to the finished sauce.
Chicken glaze
Concentrates savoury meatiness and adds body and colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the chicken stock, stirring until it boils. Adding stock slowly while stirring keeps the flour and butter mixture smooth. Dumping it in at once lets lumps form, which are hard to remove later and leave the sauce uneven.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, chicken, cream, nutmeg):

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, chicken, cream, nutmeg. 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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