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Sauce

Drawn Butter Sauce

A simple sauce made by mixing butter and flour, then simmering with water and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Drawn Butter Sauce

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 ↓

Drawn Butter Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix butter and flour in a bowl until well combined.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the butter-flour mixture with water.

  3. Cover and place the saucepan in a larger pot filled with boiling water.

  4. Shake until the mixture is thoroughly melted and remove from heat as soon as it boils.

  5. Season with salt and pepper 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.

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).

  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
Melts to form the rich fat base that carries the sauce's flavour and gloss.
Flour
Mixed with the butter, it thickens the water as the sauce heats, giving body.
Water
Forms the liquid that the butter and flour thicken into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Remove from heat as soon as it boils. Flour-thickened sauces can scorch or turn lumpy and gluey if boiled too long. Once the starch has thickened the liquid, further heating adds no body and risks burning the bottom.

“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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