Name: Chutney Sauce
Ingredients: 3 tablespoons chutney; 1 onion; ½ pint thick gravy; 1 oz butter

Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Chutney Sauce

Ingredients

3 tablespoons chutney
1 onion
½ pint thick gravy
1 oz butter

Directions

Chop the onion finely.
Fry the onion in the butter.
Add the chutney and gravy.
Boil for five minutes.

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.

Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together42,912 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Chutney: Provides the main sweet and sharp flavour of the sauce.
Onion: Softens and sweetens as it fries, adding savoury depth to the sauce.
Thick gravy: Supplies the liquid base that the sauce is built on and carries the other flavours.
Butter: Fats the onion as it fries, carrying flavour and helping it brown lightly.

“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.