Skip to main content
Main

Onion Puree Sauce

A creamy sauce made from sautéed onions, butter, flour, and milk, served with meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Onion Puree Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the onions.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the onions, salt, sugar, and pepper.

Cook the onions

  1. Simmer on low heat until the onions are soft and pulpy, stirring occasionally to prevent browning.

Thicken and serve

  1. Add the flour and milk, then boil until thickened, slightly thicker than melted butter.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve, warm again, and serve with mutton cutlets, chops, rabbits, or fowl.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Onions
Break down into a soft, pulpy base that forms the body of the sauce.
Butter
Cooks the onions gently and adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the sauce coats the back of a spoon.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the onions on low heat, stirring occasionally. Low heat softens the onions into a pulp without browning them. Browning would add bitter, caramelised flavour that changes the pale, delicate sauce, so frequent stirring matters.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes