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Sauce

Arrowroot Butter Sauce

A sauce made with arrowroot, milk, butter, nutmeg, lemon peel, and optional wine, vanilla, or pineapple, finished with cold butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Arrowroot Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the arrowroot with the milk, nutmeg, and lemon peel in a bowl until smooth.

  2. In a pan, combine the mixture with the butter over low heat, stirring until well blended.

  3. Flavor the sauce with wine, vanilla, or pineapple as desired.

Finish and serve

  1. Finish the sauce by adding small pieces of cold butter just before serving.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk and butter into a smooth, glossy sauce as it is gently heated.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel that carries the flavorings.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the arrowroot thickens into the sauce base.
Cold butter
Melted in at the end, it adds gloss and a fresh, rounded richness.

The step that matters

Heating the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot thickens when heated but can break down or turn thin and gluey if overheated or boiled too long. Keeping the heat low and stirring until blended gives a smooth, stable sauce.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, nutmeg, lemon, butter):

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Arrowrootthe original
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, nutmeg, lemon, butter. 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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