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Sauce

White Sauce for Vegetables

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, milk, cream, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

White Sauce for Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour, salt, and pepper until smooth.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the milk and cream, and bring to a boil.

  2. Boil for five minutes.

  3. Pass the sauce through a fine sieve and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Butter
Forms the fat base that carries the flour and adds richness.
Milk
Makes up the main liquid that gives the sauce its body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour, salt, and pepper until smooth.. Flour must be fully mixed into the melted butter before the liquid goes in, or lumps form. Cooking the flour in the fat also keeps the sauce from tasting raw.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, cream, milk, butter, pepper):

  1. Vanillaabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Coconutabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Figabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cream, milk, butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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