Skip to main content
Sauce

Melted Butter

A simple butter sauce made with butter, flour, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
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

Make the sauce

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

  2. Whisk in the flour until smooth and combined.

  3. Add the coarse sea salt and stir until fully incorporated.

Serve

  1. Serve warm, separate from the dish to allow guests to add as desired.

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

Unsalted butter
Provides the fat that carries flavor and gives richness, with a little moisture from its water content.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a smoother, more body-filled mixture as its starch absorbs the fat.

The step that matters

Whisk in the flour until smooth and combined.. Flour clumps when it meets hot fat unless it is whisked in steadily, so the mixture stays smooth. Keeping the heat low lets the flour cook through without browning or scorching.

“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 melted butter recipes

Sauce 103Rich 9French 5Sauce for Fish 3White Sauce 3 See all 95 →

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