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Sauce

Brown Bouillon

A brown roux made by melting butter, adding flour, and stirring until smooth.

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 ↓

Brown Bouillon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan over low heat.

  2. Skim off any impurities and let them settle.

  3. Pour the clear butter into a clean frying pan.

Make the roux

  1. Gradually add the flour to the butter, shaking the pan often.

  2. Stir constantly until the mixture is smooth and light.

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 the fat that coats the flour and carries the nutty flavour of the roux.
Flour
Its starch thickens the mixture once it is cooked in the fat, and it browns as it toasts.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually. Flour added all at once can clump, because dry starch does not disperse evenly in fat. Adding it slowly while shaking and stirring coats each grain in butter, keeping the roux smooth and helping it brown evenly rather than scorch in spots.

“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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