Skip to main content
Sauce

Melted or Drawn Butter

A simple sauce made by whisking flour into water or milk, then adding butter until melted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Melted or Drawn Butter

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Melted or Drawn Butter

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour and salt.

  2. Gradually add the water or milk, stirring until smooth.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a saucepan and place it in a vessel of boiling water.

  4. Stir as it warms, then add the butter gradually, stirring continuously until melted and fully incorporated.

  5. Boil for one minute.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a silky texture once melted in.
Water or milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.

The step that matters

Adding the butter gradually while stirring. Adding butter slowly while stirring lets it melt and emulsify evenly into the warm base. Dumping it in at once can leave greasy pockets or a separated, uneven sauce.

“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.

More melted butter sauce recipes

for Fish 3White 3 See all 103 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes