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Drawn-butter Sauce

A sweet butter sauce flavored with vanilla or lemon, thickened with flour or cornstarch and sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Drawn-butter Sauce

Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Drawn-butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the vanilla or lemon juice and hot water.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour or cornstarch with sugar to form a smooth paste.

  4. Stir the paste into the saucepan and bring to a boil for 5 minutes.

  5. Add grated nutmeg 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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Vanilla + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Vanilla + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vanilla + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Vanilla and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Provides richness and a rounded flavor base for the sauce.
Flour or cornstarch
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated and boiled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the paste into the saucepan and bring to a boil. Flour or cornstarch must be fully dispersed before heating, or it clumps. Boiling activates the starch so the sauce thickens properly.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, vanilla, flour, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Clovefits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, vanilla, flour, sugar. 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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