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When heat is applied to flour it goes hard. Very, very hard. If you mix flour and water and then cook it, it will become rock-like, so the cook makes sure that things made with flour have plenty of tiny air particles in them.

The glutens in flour which produce the starch provide the cook with a binding – liaison – an ingredient that will thicken liquids. If you stir a little cold water into an ounce of flour and go on pouring and stirring until you have half a pint of mixture you will have made a liaison à la meunière. If you apply heat to it, it will begin to thicken – keep stirring and don’t let it boil. After three minutes’ simmering the flour will have glutenized, it will be as thick as it gets and the floury taste will have disappeared. You have made a sauce. It won’t be a very interesting sauce, but if you had used flavoured water or even milk it would have been a real sauce.

Because fat can be made much hotter than water the cook usually glutenizes the flour in butter and then adds the water or etc. This combination of fat + flour is called a roux; it’s described further on pages ref1 and ref2.