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To Make Drawn Butter

A sauce made by thickening milk with butter and corn starch, seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Make Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Rub the corn starch and butter together in a bowl until well combined.

  3. Stir the butter mixture into the boiling milk until it thickens.

  4. Add salt to taste.

Serve

  1. If using capers, serve them in a heated sauce-boat and pour the drawn butter over them.

  2. If using hard-boiled eggs, stir them into the sauce 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Corn + caperstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + caperstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,637 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 to the sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it heats with the butter mixture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the butter mixture into the boiling milk until it thickens. Corn starch must be fully mixed with the butter before it meets the hot milk, otherwise it can clump. Stirring while the liquid boils lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, corn):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, corn. 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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