Skip to main content
Sauce

White Sauce for Fowls

A creamy sauce made with cream, flour, butter, nutmeg, cayenne, and oyster and cucumber catsup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

White Sauce for Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, mix the flour and butter to form a paste.

  2. Add the cream and stir over medium heat until it thickens.

  3. Stir in the grated nutmeg, cayenne pepper, and both types of catsup.

  4. Continue stirring until the sauce is smooth and heated through.

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. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster + cucumbertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together192 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Nutmeg + cucumbertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together432 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth, stable sauce.
Butter
Forms the roux with flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Cream
Forms the body of the sauce and thickens as it heats.

The step that matters

Add the cream and stir over medium heat until it thickens. Flour starch needs heat and constant stirring to swell and gelatinize. Stirring prevents lumps and scorching on the pan bottom, and the sauce thickens as the starch cooks.

Flavor stand-ins for the cucumber

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

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Spinachbetter flavor fit
  3. Potatobetter flavor fit
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, flour, butter, nutmeg, pepper, oyster. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes