Skip to main content
Sauce

Plain Melted Butter

A simple sauce made by melting butter with flour, water, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Plain Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. In a quart saucepan, mix 1 ounce of butter and 1 ounce of flour into a soft paste.

  2. Add the pepper, salt, and ½ cup of warm water.

Cook the sauce

  1. Stir over medium heat until it boils.

  2. If the sauce is too thick, add a little more warm water until it coats the spoon.

Finish the sauce

  1. Cut the remaining 2 ounces of butter into pieces.

  2. Remove the saucepan from heat.

  3. Stir in the butter until melted, and do not return to heat.

  4. For a slightly acidic flavor, stir in a little lemon juice 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 richness and flavor, and its fat gives the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in warm liquid, giving body to the butter.

The step that matters

Stir in the butter off the heat. Butter added over direct heat can separate and turn greasy, because its fat and water split when overheated. Removing the pan first lets the butter melt gently into a smooth, cohesive sauce.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes