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Sauce

Melted Butter

A sauce made by melting butter, adding flour, and cooking with water to create a simple butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Melted Butter

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 ↓

Melted Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat without browning it.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

  4. Pour in the water and bring to a boil, stirring continuously for 2 minutes.

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).

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
Melted butter forms the fat base that carries the flour and gives the sauce its rich flavor.
Flour
Flour thickens the sauce when cooked briefly in fat and then combined with liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour in melted butter for a minute cooks out its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Browning the butter would change the flavor and color, so keep the heat low.

“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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