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Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made from roasted onions, broth, flour, and seasonings, finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Roast the onions in a Dutch oven until more than half done.

  2. Peel the onions and remove the first coat.

Make the sauce

  1. Place the onions in a stewpan with broth (or water and mushroom ketchup) and flour.

  2. Season with salt, Cayenne pepper, port wine, and lemon juice.

  3. Simmer until tender.

  4. Rub the mixture through a colander and mix in a little butter.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Mushroom + port winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together570 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide the main body and sweet flavour of the sauce once softened and puréed.
Flour
Thickens the broth so the sauce becomes smooth and coats the spoon.
Port wine
Adds depth, mild sweetness and a rich aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the onions.
Butter
Adds fat for a glossy finish and a rounder mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Onions must be fully soft before straining, because undercooked pieces stay fibrous and will not pass smoothly through the colander, leaving a grainy sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, flour, pepper, port wine, lemon, butter):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, flour, pepper, port wine, lemon, 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.

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