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Sauce

Gravies and Sauces

A sauce made by browning butter with flour, pepper, and milk, finished with mint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Gravies and Sauces

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Roll the butter in flour.

  2. Stir the butter and pepper together in a pot.

  3. Let it boil for a few minutes.

  4. Add the milk and let it boil for 15 more minutes.

Serve

  1. Remove the mint and serve.

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

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

  2. Pepper + minttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Walnut + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Walnut + peppertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,039 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 of the sauce and, as it simmers, gives it body and a creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Coats the butter so it thickens the milk as the sauce boils.
Pepper
Provides the main spicy flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the milk and let it boil for 15 more minutes.. Once the flour-coated butter is in the pot, the milk must boil long enough for the starch to swell and thicken the sauce. Boiling too briefly leaves it thin, and boiling too hard can scorch the milk on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, walnut, butter, pepper, flour. 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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