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White Sauce

A creamy white sauce made with onion, carrot, celery, milk, butter, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the milk

  1. Combine onion, carrot, bay leaf, clove, peppercorns, celery, and milk in a saucepan.

  2. Bring to a boil.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in another saucepan.

  2. Stir in flour.

  3. Cook gently for a few minutes without browning.

  4. Whisk in the milk and vegetable mixture.

  5. Boil for five minutes.

  6. Season with salt.

  7. Strain through a fine sieve.

  8. Add cream and reheat.

  9. If the sauce is too thick, add more milk.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated with butter and liquid.
Butter
Forms the fat base for the roux and adds richness to the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and carries the infused flavours.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel at the end.
Onion
Releases aromatic flavour into the milk during gentle heating.

The step that matters

Cook gently for a few minutes without browning. The flour and butter must cook long enough to lose their raw, starchy taste, but browning darkens the sauce and changes its flavour, so keep the heat gentle and stir.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, celery, carrot, milk, butter, flour, cream):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, celery, carrot, milk, butter, flour, cream. 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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