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Cream Sauce

A lemon-infused cream sauce made with milk, cream, butter, flour, lemon peel, mace, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Cream Sauce

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a clean saucepan, gently boil the lemon peel and mace in the milk for 10 minutes.

  2. Add the cream and butter rolled in flour, and let it simmer for 5 minutes, stirring gently.

  3. Remove from heat and discard the lemon peel and mace.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce into a warm serving dish and stir in the strained lemon juice gently.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flavourings infuse into.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and body, and thickens the sauce when rolled in flour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the lemon juice gently. Acid can curdle dairy proteins when heated hard, so the juice should be added off the heat, at a warm temperature, and stirred gently to keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cream, butter, flour, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, butter, flour, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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