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Broths and Soups

A roux made from clarified butter and flour used to thicken soups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Broths and Soups

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the clarified butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Gradually add the flour to the melted butter, stirring continuously for 15-20 minutes until smooth and bright yellow.

  3. Pour the mixture into an earthen pan and let it cool until it can be cut with a knife.

Thicken the soup

  1. To thicken a quart of gravy, use a large tablespoonful of the mixture.

  2. Mix the thickening gradually into the soup and simmer for 30 minutes.

  3. If the soup appears lumpy, strain it through a fine sieve.

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

Clarified butter
Carries the flour and coats it so the roux cooks smoothly without scorching quickly.
Fine flour
Its starch swells when heated in fat and thickens the gravy into a smooth body.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux until smooth and bright yellow. Stirring continuously over low heat keeps the flour from lumping or scorching. Cooking it long enough removes the raw starch taste, and the cooled roux thickens more evenly when stirred into the hot soup gradually.

“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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