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White Sauce

A veal-based white sauce thickened with butter and flour, finished with cream and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Combine the knuckle of veal, ham, cloves, mace, bay leaves, parsley, thyme, onion, carrot, and turnip with water in a pot.

  2. Simmer until the broth is flavorful.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a separate pan, then add flour according to the amount of sauce desired.

  2. Cook the flour briefly, then gradually stir in the strained broth until well mixed.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook for 1 hour, then strain again.

  4. Heat the sauce, add enough cream to make it rich and white, and boil quickly while stirring until thickened.

  5. Optionally add a squeeze of lemon juice 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries the flour so it cooks smoothly into a roux.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a sauce once cooked briefly with the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and whiteness, and lends a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.
Knuckle of veal
Gives the broth body and savory depth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Adding the broth to the roux. Stirring the broth in gradually while the flour is cooked keeps the mixture smooth. Adding it all at once can leave lumps of flour that are hard to remove.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, ham, clove, parsley, thyme, onion, carrot):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Winter savoryfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, ham, clove, parsley, thyme, onion, carrot. 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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