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Sauce

Melted Butter

Melted butter is butter melted with flour and cold water, stirred until boiling, then poured into a sauce tureen.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Melted Butter

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 ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a clean saucepan, add 2 ounces of butter in pieces.

  2. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of flour over the butter.

  3. Gradually add ⅓ pint of cold water, mixing well with a spoon.

  4. Place the saucepan over medium heat and stir continuously until it boils.

  5. Pour immediately into a sauce tureen to prevent it from separating.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 flavour as the main body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and helps keep it from separating.

The step that matters

Stirring until it boils. Continuous stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed in the water and butter, so the mixture thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps. Pouring straight away helps stop the emulsion from separating as it cools.

“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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