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Young Onions in White Sauce

Young onions are boiled and served with a white sauce made from milk, flour, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Young Onions in White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Select young onions, cutting off the coarse part of the tops.

  2. Boil the onions until tender, then drain.

  3. Place the onions in a vegetable dish and sprinkle with pepper and salt.

Make the white sauce

  1. In a separate pot, scald the milk and thicken it with flour blended with melted butter.

  2. Boil the sauce sufficiently to cook the flour thoroughly.

  3. Pour the sauce over the onions and serve.

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

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Blends with the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce.
Young onions
Provide the main vegetable and are cooked until tender.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce sufficiently to cook the flour thoroughly. Flour that is not fully boiled keeps a raw, pasty taste and can leave the sauce grainy or dull. Keeping the sauce at a boil long enough cooks the starch so it thickens smoothly and tastes clean.

“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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