Skip to main content
Sauce

Soubise or Onion Sauce

A French sauce made by simmering onions in white sauce, seasoned with salt and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and onion 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 ↓

Soubise or Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the white sauce.

  2. Boil the onions until soft, then chop them finely.

Finish the sauce

  1. Stir the chopped onions into the white sauce.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil once, then season with salt and white 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.

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. Sauce + oniontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Onion + white peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Sauce + white peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together525 recipes

Sauce and onion 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

What each ingredient does

White sauce
Provides the creamy, thickened base that carries the onion flavour.
Onions
Add savoury flavour and body to the sauce once softened and finely chopped.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil once. A flour-thickened sauce needs to reach a boil to fully thicken and to cook out the raw starch taste. Stir while heating so the sauce does not scorch on the base of the pan.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, onion. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes