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White Sauce

A creamy sauce made from broth, milk, onion, mace, flour, butter, eggs, and lemon, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Combine broth and milk in a saucepan with onion and mace.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Mix flour and butter together until smooth, then add to the saucepan and stir until it boils.

  4. Strain the mixture back into the saucepan, keeping it warm but not boiling.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with salt and lemon juice.

  2. Beat the yolks of the eggs with 2-3 tablespoons of milk, then strain into the sauce.

  3. Stir without boiling.

  4. Pour the sauce over the desired dish.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and combines with flour to form a roux.
Eggs
Egg yolks add richness and further thicken the sauce when gently heated.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that gives the sauce its body.

The step that matters

Stir without boiling after adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks begin to set and can curdle or scramble if the sauce gets too hot, leaving it grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, flour, butter, lemon, egg. 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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