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Sauce

White Sauce or Butter Sauce

A simple butter and flour sauce seasoned with white pepper, nutmeg, lemon, and served with boiled celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

White Sauce or Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt 1 ounce of butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of flour, ¼ teaspoon of white pepper, and ¼ teaspoon of nutmeg; mix well.

  3. Stir in ½ cup of water and bring to a boil.

  4. Add 1 ounce of butter and the juice of 1 lemon; strain the sauce.

Cook the celery and serve

  1. Clean and wash the celery, then boil it in plenty of water with ¼ teaspoon of salt until tender.

  2. Drain the celery and serve it with the white sauce.

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. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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
Enriches the sauce with fat, adding richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and water into a smooth, body-filled sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the melted butter. Flour must be fully mixed into the fat before the liquid is added. If it is added in lumps or not cooked briefly, the sauce can turn out clumpy and taste raw. Stirring the water in gradually while bringing it to a boil helps keep the sauce smooth.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, nutmeg, lemon, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, nutmeg, lemon, celery. 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.

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Drawn 103Melted 103Lemon 58Parsley 30Black 23Brown 13 See all 80 →

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