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Sauce

Plain Melted Butter

A simple sauce made by mixing butter, flour, pepper, salt, and warm water, then adding cold butter after boiling.

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 ↓

Plain Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix 1 ounce of butter and 1 ounce of flour into a soft paste in a quart saucepan.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and ½ cup of warm water.

  3. Stir over medium heat until the mixture boils.

  4. If the mixture is too thick, add a little more warm water.

  5. Cut the remaining 2 ounces of butter into pieces and remove the saucepan from heat.

  6. Stir until the butter melts; do not return to heat.

  7. Add the cold butter after boiling for flavor.

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 + 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
Gives the sauce richness and a smooth, rounded flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells with heat.

The step that matters

Stir until the butter melts; do not return to heat.. Whisking cold butter off the heat emulsifies it into the sauce gradually. Returning the pan to heat can make the butter separate and turn the sauce greasy.

“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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