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Sauce

Onion Sauce

A sauce made from boiled onions, butter, and milk, optionally with turnip.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the onions.

  2. Boil the onions until tender.

  3. Drain the water well from the onions.

  4. Chop the onions.

Finish the sauce

  1. Pour the drawn butter and rich milk over the onions.

  2. Boil everything together once.

  3. Optionally, boil a turnip with the onions to make them milder.

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 + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + turniptop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Form the body of the sauce and give it a mild, sweet flavour when cooked soft.
Drawn butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel.
Rich milk
Adds liquid and creaminess so the chopped onions turn into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Drain the water well from the onions. Water left in the boiled onions dilutes the butter and milk, so the sauce ends up thin and watery instead of thick and creamy.

Swap the turnip

The recipe marks turnip as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, milk. 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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