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Sauce

French White Sauce

A creamy sauce made from white stock, herbs, cream, arrowroot, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and arrowroot work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 490 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

French White Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Combine ½ pint of white stock, a small bunch of savoury herbs, and a little salt in a stewpan.

  2. Boil the mixture for a few minutes to extract the herb flavor.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Return the strained stock to the heat and boil until reduced by half.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix 1 teaspoon of arrowroot with 1 tablespoon of cream until smooth.

  2. Stir the arrowroot mixture into the stock in the stewpan.

  3. Let the sauce simmer for about 15 minutes over low heat.

  4. If the sauce is too thin, stir over high heat until thickened.

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. Cream + arrowroottop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White stock
Forms the liquid base that the sauce is built on and reduced to concentrate its flavor.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving a glossy, smooth texture.
Cream
Adds richness and body, softening the sauce's flavor and mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot must be mixed smooth in cold cream first and then stirred into hot stock. Added directly, it clumps and cannot thicken evenly. Starch thickens only when heated, so the sauce must be kept hot long enough for it to swell fully.

“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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