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Sauce

Melted Butter Another Way

A sauce made by melting butter with flour and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Melted Butter Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a clean saucepan, combine the butter and flour.

  2. Place the saucepan at a distance from the fire until the butter softens to a thick cream.

  3. Mix the flour and butter together with a spoon.

  4. Pour in the boiling water while stirring well.

  5. Place the saucepan on the fire and let it boil once.

  6. Pour the mixture into a sauce-tureen.

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

Butter
Provides fat and richness, and softens into a creamy base that carries the sauce's flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving body to the finished sauce.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which thickens as the flour starch swells in the heat.

The step that matters

Pouring in the boiling water while stirring well. Flour starch clumps when it meets hot liquid all at once. Stirring constantly disperses the granules evenly, so the sauce stays smooth and thickens without lumps.

“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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