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Sauce

Onion Sauce

A sauce made from boiled onions, butter, and milk, served with rabbit, partridges, veal, or roast mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel and boil the onions until tender.

  2. Squeeze out the water and chop the onions.

  3. Melt the butter and mix it with the chopped onions.

  4. Add the milk and bring to a boil.

  5. Serve with boiled rabbits, partridges, veal, or roast mutton.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Provide the bulk of the sauce and its sweet, mellow flavour once softened by boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the onion mixture.
Milk
Thins the onion mixture into a pourable sauce and adds creaminess when brought to a boil.

The step that matters

Bringing the milk to a boil. Milk can scorch or form a skin on the bottom of the pan if heated too hard. Keep the heat moderate and stir so the sauce stays smooth and does not catch.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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