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Sauce

Butter Sauce a LA Tickletooth

A butter sauce thickened with flour and cold water, cooked in a saucepan over low heat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Butter Sauce a LA Tickletooth

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Gradually add the flour while stirring continuously with a wooden spoon.

  3. Slowly add the cold water by the spoonful while stirring.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture boils.

  5. Remove the pan from the heat.

  6. Stir until the sauce thickens to the consistency of cream and turns a light straw color.

Adjust the sauce

  1. If the sauce is too thin, add a little more flour and stir until smooth.

  2. If the sauce separates, add a small piece of cold butter and a teaspoon of cold water, then stir well until combined.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Enriches flavor and gives the sauce a rich, smooth body as it melts.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Cold water
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water slowly. Adding water gradually while stirring keeps the flour dispersed so it does not form lumps. Starch needs to be fully wetted and heated to thicken evenly.

“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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