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Sauce

Sauce Soubise

A French sauce made from onions, Velouté, cream, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Sauce Soubise

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sauce Soubise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Cover the onions and garlic with boiling water and boil for five minutes.

  2. Drain and cover again with boiling salted water; cook until tender.

  3. Rub the mixture through a puree strainer to obtain one cup of pulp.

Finish the sauce

  1. Bring the Velouté sauce to a boil; add the onion pulp and hot cream.

  2. Stir in salt and pepper.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Sliced onions
Provide the main body and sweet flavour of the sauce once softened and pureed.
Hot cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Veloute sauce
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it body and a smooth consistency.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a puree strainer. Pressing the cooked onions through a strainer breaks them down into a smooth pulp. Any remaining lumps or fibres will make the finished sauce grainy.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, cream, garlic, sauce, pepper):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, cream, garlic, sauce, pepper. 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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