Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Saurkraut

A sauerkraut dish simmered with butter, flour, bouillon, onion, and salt.

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

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Saurkraut

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Boil the sauerkraut in water until tender.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan, then mix in the flour and bake until golden.

  3. Add the bouillon to the flour mixture and bring to a boil.

Combine and serve

  1. Drain the sauerkraut and place it in a saucepan.

  2. Pour the sauce over the sauerkraut and stir well.

  3. Bring to a boil again, then add the chopped onion and salt.

  4. Serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Flour + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Sauerkraut
Forms the body of the dish and gives its tangy, savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the roux and carries flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with fat, giving it body.
Bouillon
Liquid base of the sauce that adds savoury depth.
Browned onion
Adds sweetness and deeper savoury flavour from its browning.

The step that matters

Bake the butter and flour until golden. Cooking the flour in fat until golden toasts it and removes raw starch taste, and an undercooked roux leaves the sauce pasty. Stop at golden to avoid bitterness.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. 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