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Onion Sauce

A sauce made from boiled onions, milk or cream, butter, bread or flour, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the onions and boil them in hot water for 15 minutes.

  2. Transfer to fresh hot water and boil gently until tender.

  3. Remove the outer layer and squeeze the onions between two plates.

  4. Press the onions through a colander.

  5. Chop the onions finely.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat the onions in melted butter or in milk or cream, adding crumbled bread, salt, and nutmeg.

  2. Boil the mixture for 1-2 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.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. 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

Onions
Form the body of the sauce and provide its sweet, mellow flavor when softened.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor when the onions are heated in it.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and creaminess, giving the sauce a smooth, loose texture.
Crumbled bread
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid and helping it hold together.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 1-2 minutes. Boiling briefly after adding bread thickens the sauce as starch swells and absorbs liquid. Boiling too long can make it stiff or cause scorching, so timing matters.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, bread, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, bread, nutmeg. 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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