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White Sauce

A creamy sauce made with broth, lemon, herbs, cream, butter, and flour, seasoned with salt and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the water with lemon peel, onion, peppercorns, mace or nutmeg, and sweet herbs until flavorful.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add cream, butter, and flour. Season with salt to taste.

  4. Add a squeeze of lemon after removing from heat. Shake well.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  5. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, pourable sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Cream
Adds body and a mild, rounded richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add flour to the hot liquid. Flour lumps if it meets hot liquid unevenly. Whisking it into the butter first and adding the liquid gradually helps starch granules disperse, giving a smooth sauce that thickens evenly.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, onion, mace, cream, butter, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, onion, mace, cream, butter, flour. 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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