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White Sauce

A creamy sauce made from veal and ham broth, enriched with butter, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Make a broth with the veal and ham, seasoning with cloves, mace, bay leaves, parsley, thyme, onion, carrot, and turnip.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt some butter in a pan.

  2. Add flour to the melted butter based on the desired sauce quantity.

  3. Cook the flour briefly.

  4. Stir in the strained broth and mix thoroughly.

  5. Let the sauce boil for 1 hour.

  6. Strain the sauce.

  7. Heat the sauce.

  8. Add enough cream to make it white and rich.

  9. Boil quickly while stirring until thickened.

  10. Optionally add a squeeze of lemon after removing from heat.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Veal
Gives the broth its meaty body and gelatin, adding richness to the sauce.
Butter
Forms the fat base that the flour cooks in, carrying flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce when cooked briefly in butter.
Cream
Adds whiteness, fat and a rich, smooth texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boil quickly while stirring until thickened. Flour needs to be heated fully and stirred constantly so its starch swells evenly. Stirring prevents lumps, and the sauce should be kept moving so it does not scorch on the base of the pan.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, clove, parsley, thyme, onion, carrot):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, clove, parsley, thyme, onion, carrot. 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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