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Sauce

Melted Butter

A sauce made by boiling flour and water, then adding butter and stirring until dissolved.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Melted Butter

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 ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil enough flour and water for the amount of butter you have.

  2. Skim the mixture clean.

  3. Add the butter to the hot mixture and stir until dissolved, ensuring it reaches the right thickness.

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. 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
Adds fat, richness and flavor, and melts into the hot mixture to make it smooth.
Flour
Thickens the mixture as its starch swells and gelatinizes when heated with liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and reaching the right thickness. Stirring the butter into the hot mixture lets it melt and emulsify evenly. Thickness depends on how much flour has gelatinized, so the mixture must be cooked and checked before it is used.

“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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