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Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made from sautéed onions, garlic, flour, and stock, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pan, heat the fat and sauté the finely chopped onions until soft.

  2. Add the finely chopped garlic and cook for another minute.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook until lightly browned.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  5. Gradually add enough soup stock to reach your desired consistency.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  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
Softened by sautéing, they provide the sweet, savoury base of the sauce.
Flour
Cooked with the fat and onions, it thickens the sauce and adds a light browned flavour.
Soup stock
Added gradually, it loosens the thickened base to the desired consistency.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and cook until lightly browned. Flour must cook in the hot fat long enough to lose its raw starchy taste and to thicken properly. Stock added too early or too quickly can leave lumps, so add it gradually while stirring.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, flour, 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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