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Sauce

Melted Butter

Melted butter is a simple sauce made by blending butter with flour, heating with water or milk, and boiling to remove raw taste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Melted Butter

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the flour and butter together on a wooden surface until well blended.

  2. Add the hot water or milk and mix thoroughly.

  3. Transfer to a small saucepan and heat, shaking it continuously until it boils.

  4. Boil for one minute to remove the raw taste.

  5. Adjust thickness by adding more water or milk if needed.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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, and melts to form the body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.
Hot water or milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens; milk adds richness and creaminess.

The step that matters

Boil for one minute. Flour starch only fully cooks when it reaches a boil, and boiling for a minute removes the raw floury taste. Stopping early leaves the sauce tasting pasty.

“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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