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Sauce

Onion Sauce

A sauce made by browning onions, adding beef gravy, cayenne pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Finely slice the onions and brown them in the oil.

  2. Add the browned onions to the beef gravy.

  3. Stir in the cayenne pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve as a sauce for steaks.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Onion + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 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
Browning in oil builds sweet, savoury flavour that gives the sauce its body.
Beef gravy
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the other flavours.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and onions.

The step that matters

Browning the onions. Onions need enough time over moderate heat to brown rather than steam or burn. Browning builds deep flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation, which shapes the whole sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, beef, 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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