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Sauce

Creamy Sauce

A light, sweet sauce made with butter, powdered sugar, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Creamy Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Beat the butter and powdered sugar together until light and creamy.

  2. Mix the flour with a little cold water to make a smooth paste.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the flour mixture with the cup of water and cook until it thickens like thin starch.

  2. Slowly pour the thickened mixture into the creamed butter and sugar while continuing to beat.

  3. Do not stop beating, or the sauce will become airy like sea foam.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Creams with sugar to give the sauce richness and a smooth, light body.
Flour
Thickens the water into a starch paste that gives the sauce body.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the sauce and dissolves smoothly when creamed with butter.

The step that matters

Keep beating while adding the thickened mixture. Pouring in the thickened starch while beating keeps the mixture evenly blended. If beating stops, the sauce can turn airy and foamy instead of smooth.

“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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