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Sauce

Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made from onions, garlic, flour, and stock.

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

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the finely-chopped onions in fat.

  2. Add the finely chopped garlic and cook briefly.

  3. Brown a small amount of flour in the mixture.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  5. Add enough soup stock to thin the sauce.

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

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

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

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 stew, forming the sauce's base flavour.
Flour
Browns in the fat and thickens the sauce as it cooks with the stock.
Soup stock
Adds liquid and savoury flavour, thinning the sauce to the desired consistency.
Fat
Carries the onions' flavour and helps them stew and brown evenly.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat must brown gently and evenly; if it scorches it turns bitter, and if it is left raw it tastes pasty. Stirring steadily until it smells nutty helps.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Clovethe original

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