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Cream Sauce

A light lemon-flavored cream sauce made with milk, cream, butter, lemon peel, mace, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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, then let it simmer for 5 minutes, stirring gently in one direction.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat, take out the lemon peel and mace, and pour the sauce into a warm serving dish.

  2. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon through a sieve into the sauce, stirring 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 carries the lemon and mace flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, velvety texture.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour; flour coating helps it thicken the sauce without lumps.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich dairy and balances its flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour-coated butter and simmering. Flour thickens the sauce only when heated long enough to cook its starch. Stirring gently in one direction helps keep the sauce smooth and prevents lumps from forming.

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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