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Browned Elour Tor Thickening Soups and Gravies

A method of browning flour and mixing it with butter to thicken soups and gravies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter 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 ↓

Browned Elour Tor Thickening Soups and Gravies

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Spread flour on a tin or dish.

  2. Color the flour in a gentle oven or before the fire, turning it often to prevent burning.

  3. Blend the browned flour with butter to create a thickening for soups or gravies.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Browning gives it a nutty aroma and deeper color, and it thickens liquids when mixed with fat.
Butter
Fat that combines with the browned flour to form a smooth paste for thickening.

The step that matters

Turning the flour while it colors. Flour browns unevenly and can scorch quickly on the bottom or edges. Turning it often keeps the color even and prevents burnt, bitter flavor.

“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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