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Sauce

Rich Melted Butter

A buttery sauce made by melting butter with flour, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Rich Melted Butter

Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Rich Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, salt, and cold water to form a smooth batter.

  2. Pour the mixture into a clean saucepan.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the butter cut into small pieces.

  2. Shake the saucepan vigorously almost continuously until the sauce is well combined.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Starch thickens the water base and helps hold the butter in a smooth, stable sauce.
Butter
Supplies fat for richness and flavor, and emulsifies into a silky sauce.

The step that matters

Shaking the saucepan almost continuously. Constant agitation keeps the small butter pieces dispersed in the water base as they melt, forming an emulsion. If the mixture is left still, the fat can separate and the sauce turns greasy and broken.

“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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