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Sauce

White Sauce

A simple sauce made with onions, butter, flour, water, cayenne, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Peel and slice the onions and place them in a small saucepan with 2 ounces of butter.

  2. Simmer until the butter is almost absorbed.

  3. Stir in the flour mixed with the remaining butter and the water.

  4. Add cayenne and salt, then boil until the sauce thickens.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain and return to the pan for a minute 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 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 the sauce with fat and richness, and helps carry flavour from the onions.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Onions
Add savoury flavour and aroma to the sauce as they soften in butter.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter into the water. Adding flour directly to hot liquid can form lumps because starch clumps before it disperses. Mixing the flour with butter first coats the grains so they blend smoothly into the water and thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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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