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Soubise Sauce

A French sauce of onions simmered in milk and combined with white sauce, seasoned with salt, pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Soubise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the onions and boil them in the milk with a little salt until tender.

  2. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and return it to the saucepan with the white sauce.

  3. Boil for about 10 minutes, then season with pepper and sugar.

  4. Add more salt if necessary.

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

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

  2. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Onion + milktop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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
Soften as they cook and, once sieved, give the sauce its body and sweet, mellow flavour.
Milk
Cooks the onions gently and forms the smooth, creamy liquid base of the sauce.
White sauce
Adds thickness and body so the sieved onion purée becomes a coating sauce.
Castor sugar
Rounds out the flavour and softens the sharpness of the onions.

The step that matters

Rub the onions through a fine sieve. Pushing the cooked onions through a fine sieve breaks down their cell walls into a smooth purée. Skipping this or using a coarse sieve leaves gritty pieces that spoil the silky texture of the sauce.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, sauce, 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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