Skip to main content
Main

Soubise, or Onion Purée

A creamy onion purée made with milk, cream, butter, flour, and stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Soubise, or Onion Purée

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Wash and peel the onions, then slice them.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the onions. Sweat for 10 minutes without browning.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the white stock, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and simmer until the onions are soft.

  2. Press the mixture through a fine sieve, scraping underneath to extract all the puree.

  3. Return the puree to the saucepan, add the boiled milk and cream, and stir until smooth.

  4. Serve with fried bread.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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
Form the bulk of the sauce, and their sugars sweeten it as they soften.
Butter
Carries the onions' flavour and keeps them soft while they sweat without browning.
White stock
Cooks the onions until soft and supplies the liquid for the puree.
Milk
Adds liquid and mildness, making the puree smooth and pourable.
Cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a silky texture and body.

The step that matters

Sweating the onions without browning. Gentle heat softens the onions and draws out their sweetness. If they brown, the sauce turns bitter and dark instead of mild and creamy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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