Skip to main content
Sauce

Brown Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made with brown stock, onions, dripping, cornflour, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Brown Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew-pan, fry the onions in dripping until they are nicely browned.

  2. Add the brown stock and bring to a boil.

  3. Mix the cornflour with a little water and add it to the sauce.

  4. Simmer slowly until the onions are cooked.

Finish

  1. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt 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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Sweetness and savoury depth as they brown and soften in the sauce.
Dripping
Fat that carries the frying heat and helps the onions brown well.
Brown stock
Liquid base that gives the sauce its body and savoury flavour.
Cornflour
Starch that thickens the stock into a sauce when heated.

The step that matters

Mixing the cornflour with water first. Cornflour clumps if added dry or undissolved. Blending it with a little cold water first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the hot stock smoothly once it reaches the boil.

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes