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Sauce

White Roux, or Trench Thickening

A roux made with butter and flour, used to thicken white gravies or sauces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

White Roux, or Trench Thickening

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat until it simmers.

  2. Add the flour to the butter immediately and stir continuously.

  3. Cook until the mixture is smooth and has not taken on any color.

Use

  1. Use this roux for white gravies or sauces.

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
Provides fat that coats flour particles and carries flavor into the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Starch that thickens the liquid it is later mixed into once cooked.

The step that matters

Cook the flour in the butter without browning. Stirring constantly keeps the flour from clumping and scorching. Cooking it only until smooth and pale removes the raw starch taste while keeping a white color for light sauces.

“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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