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Sauce

Drawn Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made by melting butter, whisking in flour, salt, pepper, and hot water, then boiling.

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 the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour with salt and pepper, then add it to the melted butter.

  3. Gradually pour in the hot water while stirring.

  4. Boil for five minutes.

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 fat and rich flavour, and is the base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.

The step that matters

Gradually pour in the hot water while stirring. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed, which prevents lumps from forming as the starch hydrates.

“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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