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Sauce

Young Onion Sauce

A sauce made from boiled button onions, optionally finished with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Young Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the button onions and soak them in water until ready to boil.

Cook

  1. Place the onions in a stewpan with cold water and bring to a boil.

  2. Cook until tender, about 30 to 60 minutes depending on size.

  3. If desired, mix in melted butter before serving.

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 + 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

Button onions
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce as they soften and release their sweetness.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Cooking until tender. Onions of different sizes need different times, so judging by size and testing for tenderness prevents underdone centres or mushy smaller onions.

“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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