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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by beating butter and flour, then adding boiling water and simmering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the drawn butter

  1. Beat the butter and flour together until creamy.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Set the mixture on the fire and let it come to a boil, but do not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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
Provides fat and rich flavor, forming the body of the sauce as it melts.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water mixture so it clings to food rather than running off.

The step that matters

Heating without boiling. Once the butter and flour are combined with the water, letting it boil hard can break the emulsion and make the sauce grainy or separated. Bringing it just to a simmer keeps the starch smooth and the fat evenly suspended.

“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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