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To Dress Onions with a White Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Dress Onions with a White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare the onions by peeling and trimming them.

  2. In a saucepan, combine equal parts milk and water and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the onions and boil until they are tender.

  4. Meanwhile, prepare a white sauce as you would for celery.

  5. Once the onions are tender, drain them and mix with the white sauce.

  6. Serve the dressed onions warm.

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 + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Sauce + milktop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, milk):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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