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Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made from onions, ham, and béchamel, simmered and blended.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and quarter the onions.

Cook the onions

  1. In a saucepan, combine the onions, chopped ham, bay leaf, mace, cayenne, salt, and enough water to cover.

  2. Simmer until the onions are tender, about 30 to 45 minutes, shaking the saucepan occasionally without removing the lid.

Finish the sauce

  1. Remove the onions, drain them, and pass them through a sieve into the Béchamel sauce.

  2. Heat the mixture on the stove until it boils, and the sauce is ready.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  4. Onion + hamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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 when simmered and, once sieved, give the sauce its body and flavor.
Béchamel sauce
Forms the creamy base that the sieved onions are blended into.
Lean ham
Adds savory, meaty flavor to the onion cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Simmering the onions until tender. Onions that are not fully softened will leave the sieved sauce grainy and sharp. Gentle simmering breaks down their cell walls so they pass smoothly through a sieve and blend into the sauce.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, ham, 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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