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Cheese Sauce

A simple sauce made with milk, butter, flour, and cheese, seasoned with salt and pepper.

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

Cheese Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour, stir, and cook for 5 minutes without browning.

  3. Add the milk and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Stir in the cheese and use as required.

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. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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
Provides fat for flavour and richness, and forms the base for the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot butter and milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and richness, and melts smoothly into the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the flour in the butter without browning. Cooking the flour briefly removes its raw taste and lets the starch thicken smoothly once the milk goes in. Browning changes the flavour and weakens the thickening power, and lumps form if the milk is added too cold or all at once.

“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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