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Sauce

Melted Butter

A sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, water, and salt, then simmering until thickened, used over fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Melted Butter

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 ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir for one minute to cook it.

Thicken and serve

  1. Gradually add the water, stirring until it boils and thickens.

  2. Boil gently for three minutes, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

  3. Stir in one direction to avoid curdling.

  4. Add the salt and pour into a basin or over the fish.

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. 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
Melts to form the fat base and gives the sauce its rich flavour.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated in liquid, thickening the sauce.
Water
Forms the liquid body of the sauce that the flour thickens.

The step that matters

Gradually add the water while stirring. Adding liquid slowly while stirring lets the flour starch disperse evenly. Dumping it in at once causes lumps, and the sauce cannot thicken smoothly.

“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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