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Sauce

White Sauce for Boiled Fowls

A creamy white sauce made with milk, butter, flour, egg yolk, and cream, served over boiled fowls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

White Sauce for Boiled Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

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

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the milk, stirring constantly until thickened.

Enrich and finish

  1. In a small bowl, beat the egg yolk with the cream.

  2. Stir the egg mixture into the sauce and heat gently, stirring constantly.

  3. Add chopped parsley if desired.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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 with the flour to form a roux that begins to thicken the sauce and adds richness.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the sauce body and a smooth, coating texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the sauce.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and further thickens the sauce when gently heated.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the sauce and heat gently, stirring constantly.. Egg yolk can curdle or scramble if it gets too hot or is added without stirring. Gentle heat and constant stirring keep the sauce smooth while the yolk thickens it.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, egg, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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