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Sauce with Onions

A creamy sauce made with onions, milk, white sauce, cream, butter, sugar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Sauce with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel and blanch the onions, then slice them.

  2. Put the onions in a saucepan with the milk and boil until tender.

  3. Drain the milk and pass the onions through a fine sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the onions with the white sauce in a saucepan and boil until reduced by half.

  2. Mix in the cream and season with salt, pepper, and sugar.

  3. Stir over low heat for a few minutes until ready to serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  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
Provide the main body and sweet flavour of the sauce once softened and sieved.
Milk
Softens the onions as they simmer and adds mild richness to the sauce.
White sauce
Forms the base of the sauce, giving body and a smooth, thick texture.
Cream
Adds fat and a silky texture, rounding out the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and a rich, smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Pass the onions through a fine sieve. Sieving breaks down the softened onion fibres into a smooth purée. Skipping or rushing this leaves the sauce grainy or stringy instead of silky.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sauce, cream, pepper, sugar, butter. 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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Brown 49White 27Sage 9Young 8Spanish 5Fried 3 See all 175 →

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