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Roux, Brown and White, to Thicken Sauces, &C.

A roux made by slowly melting butter and stirring in flour to thicken sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Roux, Brown and White, to Thicken Sauces, &C.

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter slowly in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the sifted flour until it forms a thick paste.

  3. Cook over low heat for 15 minutes without letting it brown.

  4. Store the roux in an earthen dish for later use.

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
Carries the flour and forms the fat base that gives the roux its smooth, rich texture.
All-purpose flour
Its starch thickens the melted butter into a paste, and cooking it gradually sets that thickening power.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat without letting it brown. Gentle heat cooks out the raw flour taste and thickens the roux evenly. Too much heat scorches the starch and browns it unevenly, changing the flavor and thickening strength.

“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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