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Sauce

Onion Sauce

A white sauce made with onions, milk, meat liquor, butter, and flour, seasoned with salt and pepper.

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

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the onions and boil them until tender, changing the water if they are old.

  2. Chop the onions very small.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a white sauce with the milk, butter, and flour.

  2. Add the chopped onions to the sauce, season with salt and pepper, and boil briefly.

  3. Serve very hot.

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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, mellow flavour of the sauce once softened and chopped.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and forms the base with flour for the white sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a white sauce by gelatinising its starch when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the white sauce, giving it body and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Make the white sauce smooth before adding the onions. Flour must be cooked with butter and milk while stirring, or lumps form and the starch will not thicken evenly. Stirring as the milk is added keeps the sauce smooth and fully thickened before the chopped onions go in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, meat, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, meat, butter, 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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