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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by mixing butter and flour, then adding boiling water and cooking until smooth.

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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream together the butter and flour.

  2. Pour in the boiling water and stir well.

  3. Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. If the sauce is too thick, add a little more water.

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 fat and rich flavour, and helps the sauce feel smooth and silky.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth sauce as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stirring keeps the flour from clumping while the starch swells and thickens the liquid. Cooking long enough removes the raw floury taste.

“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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