Skip to main content
Sauce

White Sauce

A simple sauce made with butter, flour, milk, cream, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour smoothly.

Add the milk and finish

  1. Add the salt, pepper, and milk gradually, stirring continuously.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for three minutes.

  3. Stir in the cream and lemon juice.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 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. Flour + milktop 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
Melts to carry flavour and forms the fat base that the flour is stirred into.
Flour
Its starch thickens the hot liquid into a smooth, pourable sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as the starch swells.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Add the milk gradually, stirring continuously. Flour starch clumps when liquid is poured in too fast, leaving lumps that are hard to remove. Adding the milk slowly while stirring lets each part of the starch disperse evenly before the sauce thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream, pepper. 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.

More white sauce recipes

English 22Turnips in 20Fish in 17for Poultry 12Cauliflower in 11Lemon 9 See all 309 →

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes