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To Dress Beetroot and Small Onions with a Sauce Piquante

A hot beetroot and onion dish served with a piquant sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Dress Beetroot and Small Onions with a Sauce Piquante

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash the beetroots carefully to avoid breaking the fibers.

  2. Boil the beetroots and button onions until tender.

  3. Remove the skins and outside fibers from the beetroots and slice them.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, mince and fry the onion in butter until brown.

  2. Add flour to the fried onion and brown it as well.

  3. Stir in the soup, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

Stew and serve

  1. Stew the sliced beetroot in the sauce for 10 minutes.

  2. Serve the onions in the center with the beetroot and sauce around it, very hot.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Beetroot + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together515 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Beetroot + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,261 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beetroot + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together574 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beetroots
Gives the dish its main body, colour and earthy sweetness once cooked.
Button onions
Cook until tender and add sweetness and mild flavour to the dish.
Onion
Browned in butter to build a deep, savoury flavour base for the sauce.
Butter
Carries the frying of the onion and adds richness and browning to the sauce.
Flour
Browned with the onion and thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and gives it a piquant edge.

The step that matters

Browning the onion and flour. Frying the onion until brown and then browning the flour builds the roasted flavour of the sauce. Flour that is stirred in too early or cooked too briefly can taste raw and pasty, and the sauce may not thicken smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, butter, flour, lemon, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, butter, flour, lemon, 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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