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Sauce

Melted Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made from butter, flour, water, 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 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 ↓

Melted Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. In a small saucepan, melt half of the butter.

  2. Stir in the flour and mix until smooth.

  3. Pour in the cold water and stir until it boils.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the remaining butter in small pieces.

  2. Add salt to taste 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.

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 + 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
Adds richness and flavour, and its fat gives the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Removing the saucepan from the heat before adding the remaining butter. If the sauce is still very hot, the added butter can melt too fast and separate into greasy droplets. Off the heat, the butter melts gently and emulsifies into the thickened liquid, keeping the sauce smooth.

“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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