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Sauce

Melted Butter

A simple sauce made by melting butter, whisking flour with water, and cooking until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Melted Butter

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

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the water until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the flour mixture to the melted butter, stirring constantly.

  4. Cook until the sauce thickens, then serve warm.

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
Provides fat and rich flavour, and carries the sauce's body once melted.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the melted butter. Stirring constantly while adding the flour mixture keeps it dispersed, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps. Lumps form when starch clumps before it can disperse evenly in the fat and liquid.

“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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