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Sauce

Drawn Butter

A sauce made by beating butter and flour, then adding boiling water and heating until thickened.

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

Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the butter and flour together until creamy.

  2. Pour the boiling water over the mixture.

  3. Set it on the fire and let it come to a boil, but do not boil.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. 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
Provides the fat that gives the sauce its rich flavor and smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the butter and water so the sauce coats the spoon instead of running thin.
Boiling water
Forms the liquid base that the butter and flour are whisked into, making the sauce pourable.

The step that matters

Heating without boiling. If the mixture is held at a full rolling boil, the fat can separate from the water and the sauce may turn oily or grainy. Heat only until it just comes to a boil, then remove it from the fire.

“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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