Skip to main content
Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, boiling water, salt, cold water, and optionally white wine and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour until well combined.

  3. Add the boiling water and salt, and bring to a boil for a few minutes.

  4. Stir in the cold water.

Finish

  1. For pudding sauce, mix in the white wine and grated nutmeg.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. White wine + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,659 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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 forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth, pourable sauce.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the pudding sauce version.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the melted butter. Cooking the flour in the butter for a moment removes its raw taste, and stirring it in well prevents lumps when the liquid goes in.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, white wine):

  1. Jalapenofits about as well
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, white wine. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesWine Sauce for Sweet PuddingsWine Sauce for Sweet Puddings6 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes