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White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with broth, milk, onion, mace, butter, flour, egg yolks, lemon, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Combine broth, milk, onion, and mace in a stew-pan. Bring to a boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Rub butter and flour together on a plate until well mixed, then add the butter-flour mixture to the stew-pan and stir until it boils.

  3. Reduce heat and stir occasionally until the sauce is smooth.

  4. Strain the sauce through a sieve into a basin, then return it to the stew-pan.

Finish and enrich

  1. Season with salt and lemon juice.

  2. Beat egg yolks with 3 tablespoons of milk in a bowl, then strain into the sauce.

  3. Stir well and keep the sauce warm, but do not let it boil to avoid curdling.

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. Butter + flourtop 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. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Melted with flour to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Forms a roux with butter that thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Egg yolks
Add richness and thickening power when gently heated into the sauce.
Milk
Forms the creamy body of the sauce and adds richness.
Broth
Provides the savoury liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce below a boil after adding the egg yolks. Egg proteins set when heated, so boiling after the yolks are added can curdle the sauce and make it grainy. Gentle warmth thickens it smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, onion, butter, flour, lemon, egg):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, butter, flour, lemon, egg. 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.

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