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Sauce

English White Sauce

A sauce made from veal gravy, lemon rind, arrowroot or flour, butter, salt, cream, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

English White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the veal gravy softly with the lemon rind for 15 to 20 minutes to infuse flavor.

  2. Stir in the arrowroot or flour mixed with butter to thicken.

  3. Add salt if needed.

  4. Mix in the boiling cream until 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.

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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Veal + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal gravy
Provides the savoury base that the sauce is built on.
Arrowroot or flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce becomes smooth and coats a spoon.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the thickener blend in smoothly.
Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a rounder, silkier texture.
Lemon rind
Infuses the sauce with a bright citrus aroma during simmering.

The step that matters

Stir in the arrowroot or flour mixed with butter to thicken.. Adding the thickener to hot liquid without first mixing it smoothly with butter can form lumps, because starch clumps when it hits hot liquid unevenly. Blending it into the butter first helps it disperse evenly for a smooth sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, lemon, arrowroot, butter, cream):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, lemon, arrowroot, butter, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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