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Sauce

Brown Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made from onions, garlic, butter, flour, water, salt, pepper, and mushroom ketchup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Brown Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Chop the onion and garlic very small.

  2. Fry the onion and garlic in butter until browned.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook until brown.

Simmer and finish

  1. Add water, stir, and bring to a boil for 10-15 minutes.

  2. Strain the sauce and season with salt, pepper, and mushroom ketchup.

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 + mushroomtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Onion
Browning builds sweetness and savoury depth as its sugars caramelise.
Garlic
Adds aroma that mellows and deepens during frying.
Butter
Fat carries the cooking heat and helps the onion and garlic brown.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the liquid, and browning adds nutty flavour.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and cook until brown. Flour must be cooked in the fat until it turns brown to remove its raw, floury taste and add nutty colour. Stopping early leaves the sauce pale and tasting raw, while over-browning makes it bitter.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, butter, flour, pepper, mushroom, ketchup. 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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