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Sauce

White Sauce

A simple sauce made from butter, flour, milk, and sugar, simmered until thick and sweet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

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

  2. Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the flour.

Cook the sauce

  1. Gradually add the milk, stirring continuously.

  2. Return the saucepan to the heat and bring to a boil.

  3. Boil for five minutes, stirring frequently.

  4. Sweeten with the sugar before serving.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 fat and richness, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Flour
Starch thickens the liquid as it swells during cooking, giving the sauce body.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, adding creaminess and body as it thickens.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the richness of the milk and butter.

The step that matters

Add the milk gradually while stirring. Adding the milk slowly and stirring constantly lets the flour disperse evenly in the fat and liquid. If the milk goes in too fast, the starch clumps and lumps form, which are hard to remove once the sauce thickens.

“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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