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Onion Sauce

A sauce made from boiled onions, butter, and milk, served with rabbit, partridges, veal, or roast mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,585 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the onions.

  2. Boil the onions until tender.

  3. Squeeze the water from the onions.

  4. Chop the onions.

  5. Optionally, boil a turnip with the onions to make them milder.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan until rich and smooth.

  2. Add the chopped onions to the butter.

  3. Add milk to the mixture.

  4. Boil once.

Serve

  1. Serve with boiled rabbits, partridges, veal, or roast mutton.

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 + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Butter + turniptop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften into a sweet, mild base that thickens and gives the sauce its body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Milk
Loosens the onion mixture into a creamy, pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the onions until tender. Onions that are not fully softened stay sharp and fibrous, so the sauce turns out harsh and grainy rather than smooth and mild.

Swap the turnip

The recipe marks turnip as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, butter, milk):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, milk. 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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