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Another Brown Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made from stewed onions, butter, flour, broth, salt, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Another Brown Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the onions

  1. Mince the onions and stew them in butter until well colored.

  2. Stir in the flour.

  3. Shake the pan over the heat for 3-4 minutes.

Finish the sauce

  1. Pour in enough broth or gravy to keep the sauce thick.

  2. Season with salt.

  3. Serve.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 onions
Soften and brown to give the sauce its main sweet, savory flavor and color.
Butter
Carries the cooking and helps the onions brown, adding richness.
Broth or gravy
Adds liquid and savory depth, keeping the sauce loose and moist.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.

The step that matters

Stew the onions until well colored. Browning the onions slowly develops sweet, deep flavor through caramelization. Stopping too early leaves the sauce pale and flat, while cooking too long or too hot can scorch them and taste bitter.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar. 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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