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Sauce

Drawn Butter, or Melted Butter

A sauce made by mixing flour with butter and water, then heating until simmering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Drawn Butter, or Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub 2 teaspoons of flour into ½ cup of butter.

  2. Add 5 tablespoons of cold water.

Melt and heat

  1. Set the mixture into boiling water and let it melt.

  2. Heat until it begins to simmer, then remove from heat.

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).

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
Supplies the fat and rich flavor that define the drawn butter.
Flour
Helps stabilize the butter and water so the mixture stays smooth rather than separating.

The step that matters

Removing from heat at the first simmer. Once the mixture begins to simmer, removing it from heat keeps the butter from overheating, which can scorch the milk solids and cause the fat to separate.

“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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