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Sauce with Onions

A sauce made from parboiled onions, butter, sugar, flour, and milk or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sauce with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Parboil the onions for a few minutes.

  2. Roughly mince them.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the minced onions, sugar, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cook slowly without browning.

  3. Stir in the flour.

  4. Once the onions are tender, pass the mixture through a sieve.

  5. Dilute the onion pulp with enough milk or cream to make a sauce.

  6. Heat the sauce and serve.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Onions
Form the bulk of the sauce, and their natural sugars sweeten and deepen it when cooked slowly.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor as the onions soften in it.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce so it holds body once liquid is added.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and smoothness, loosening the onion pulp into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the onions slowly without browning. Gentle heat softens the onions and draws out their sweetness. Browning adds bitter, toasted notes and a darker color that do not suit a white onion sauce, and it can scorch the flour mixture.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

More onion sauce recipes

Brown 49White 27Sage 9Young 8Spanish 5Fried 3 See all 175 →

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