Skip to main content
Dessert

White Melted Butter

A simple butter made by thickening milk, boiling, and adding butter until melted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Thicken the milk with less than 2 tablespoons of flour or a little arrowroot.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Gradually stir in the fresh butter until fully dissolved, stirring continuously to prevent it from separating.

  4. For a variation, use thin cream instead of milk and add lemon rind, salt, and pounded mace.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce as it cooks.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce its silky mouthfeel and buttery flavour.
New milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the butter. Butter is added to a hot liquid and can separate into greasy droplets if it is added too fast or left unstirred. Continuous stirring while it melts keeps the fat emulsified into a smooth sauce.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, flour, butter, mace):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, mace. 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.

More melted butter recipes

Sauce 103Rich 9French 5Sauce for Fish 3White Sauce 3 See all 95 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes