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Sauce

Melted Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, then simmering with cold liquid and salt.

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

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Melted Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. When it starts to splutter, add the flour and mix thoroughly, ensuring it does not brown.

  3. Add the cold water or milk and salt, then simmer gently for five minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 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 form the fat base that the flour is cooked into.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when mixed into the hot butter and liquid.
Cold water or milk
Forms the liquid body of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the butter without browning. Flour must be mixed thoroughly into the melted butter and kept from browning, because a raw-tasting or browned roux changes the flavour and colour of the sauce. Adding cold liquid to the hot roux then needs stirring so lumps do not form.

“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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