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Sauce

Soubise Sauce

A French sauce made from onions, butter, veal gravy, cream, salt, cayenne, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Soubise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add the minced onions and cook until they are reduced to a pulp.

  3. Pour in the veal gravy and season with salt and cayenne if needed.

  4. Skim off any fat and strain the sauce through a sieve.

  5. Heat the strained sauce in a clean saucepan and mix in the boiling cream.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + vealtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,841 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

White onions
Cook down to a pulp, giving the sauce its body and sweet, mellow flavour.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while the onions soften.
Veal gravy
Supplies the main liquid and savoury depth of the sauce.
Boiling cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the onions to a pulp. Onions must cook slowly over low heat until fully soft; if they brown or are rushed, the sauce turns bitter or stays grainy. Straining afterwards removes any remaining fibres for a smooth texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, veal, cream, pepper, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, veal, cream, pepper, sugar. 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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