Skip to main content
Main

White Sauoe

A creamy sauce made from broth, milk, onion, mace, flour, butter, egg yolks, and lemon, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Sauoe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine broth and milk in a stew-pan with onion and mace, and boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix flour and butter on a plate until smooth, then add to the stew-pan and stir until it boils.

  3. Reduce heat and stir occasionally until smooth, then strain through a sieve into a basin.

Season and finish

  1. Return the strained sauce to the stew-pan and season with salt and lemon juice.

  2. Beat egg yolks with 3 tablespoons of milk, strain into the sauce, and stir well.

  3. Keep the sauce near the fire without boiling to prevent curdling.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, and with flour forms the roux base.
Egg yolks
Add richness and further thicken the sauce when gently heated without boiling.
Milk
Forms the creamy body of the sauce and adds mild sweetness.
Broth
Provides the savoury liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the sauce near the fire without boiling. Egg yolks in the sauce can scramble and curdle if it gets too hot. Holding it warm but not boiling keeps it smooth and thick.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, onion, flour, butter, lemon, egg):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, onion, flour, butter, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More white sauce recipes

English 22Turnips in 20Fish in 17for Poultry 12Cauliflower in 11Lemon 9 See all 309 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes