Skip to main content
Sauce

Butter Sauce or Plain Melted Butter

A simple sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, water, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Butter Sauce or Plain Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt 2 ounces of butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add 1.5 ounces of flour and stir with a wooden spoon until smooth.

Add liquid and finish

  1. Gradually add ⅔ pint of cold water, stirring continuously.

  2. Cook over heat until the sauce thickens.

  3. Add salt to taste. Optionally, stir in an additional ounce of butter for extra flavor.

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
Carries flavor and adds richness, and its fat coats the flour so the paste blends smoothly.
Flour
Starch thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the sauce its body.

The step that matters

Adding the water gradually. Flour starch must be dispersed evenly in the fat before liquid is added. Adding the cold water slowly while stirring prevents lumps, because starch granules clump when they meet liquid in concentrated 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.

More butter sauce recipes

Drawn 103Melted 103Lemon 58Parsley 30Black 23Brown 13 See all 80 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes