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Stewed Beets, with Butter Sauce

Stewed beets simmered in a butter and flour sauce with vinegar and white broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stewed Beets, with Butter Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the beets as described in the previous recipe.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, sauté the finely chopped onion in 4 ounces of butter until lightly browned.

  2. Stir in 2 tablespoons of flour and cook until light brown.

  3. Add ⅓ cup of vinegar and enough white broth to create a light sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. Cut the boiled beets into quarters and add them to the sauce.

  2. Allow the mixture to simmer for 15 minutes before serving.

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. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Butter + oniontop 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

Beets
Form the main body of the dish and carry its earthy flavor and color.
Butter
Adds fat and richness while carrying the onion flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks in the butter, giving it a light body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet flavor of the beets.
White onion
Adds savory depth and aroma when browned in butter.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the butter and onion. Cooking flour in fat until light brown removes raw starch taste and lets it thicken the sauce evenly. Stopping too early leaves a pasty flavor, while overcooking can darken and weaken thickening.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, flour, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, flour, vinegar. 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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