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White Sauce

A creamy sauce made from butter, flour, milk, and optional mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 roux

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan.

  2. Mix in the flour and stir over medium heat for 3 minutes without browning.

  3. Remove from heat and stir until cool.

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually add the boiling milk while stirring continuously.

  2. Return to heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

  3. Add chopped mushrooms if using and simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. Pass through a fine sieve into a clean basin.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Milk + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Forms the fat base of the roux and adds richness and flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, giving the sauce body.
Milk
Forms the liquid that the starch thickens into a smooth, pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the boiling milk gradually while stirring. Adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the starch dispersed, so lumps do not form. Cooking the roux without browning keeps the flavour mild and the thickening power intact.

“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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