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Onion Puree Sauce

A smooth onion sauce made by simmering onions with butter, salt, sugar, pepper, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Puree Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the onions.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the onions, butter, salt, sugar, and pepper.

  3. Place the saucepan on low heat.

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer until the onions are soft, stirring occasionally to prevent browning.

  2. Add the flour and milk.

  3. Boil until the sauce thickens slightly, thicker than melted butter.

  4. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Warm the sauce again.

Serve

  1. Serve with mutton cutlets, chops, rabbits, or fowl.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook down, forming the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor while the onions soften gently.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the sauce coats the back of a spoon.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a smooth, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the onions gently. Stirring occasionally keeps the onions from browning. Browned onions turn the sauce bitter and dark instead of mild and pale, and gentle heat softens them evenly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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