Skip to main content
Drink

Onion Sauce

A sauce made from boiled onions, blended with butter or cream, seasoned with salt and optional mace or nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the onions and soak them in salt water for a few minutes.

  2. Boil the onions in plenty of water, changing the water once.

  3. Chop the onions finely and press them through a sieve with a wooden spoon.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir the onion pulp into thin melted butter or cream and heat it up.

  2. Optionally, add a little mace or nutmeg if using cream.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  3. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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
Provide the bulk of the sauce and its sweet, mild onion flavour once pureed.
Thin melted butter or cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety body to the onion pulp.
Mace or nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic note to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the onions in changing water. Boiling in plenty of water and changing it once helps draw out the sharp sulphur compounds that make onions harsh, leaving a milder, sweeter pulp. Skipping the change can leave the sauce tasting bitter or pungent.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter. 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.

More onion sauce recipes

Brown 49White 27Sage 9Young 8Spanish 5Fried 3 See all 175 →

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes