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Sauce

Young Onion Sauce

A sauce made by boiling young onions in water, optionally served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Young Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the Button Onions and soak them in water until ready to cook.

  2. Place the onions in a stew pan with 4 cups of cold water.

Cook

  1. Boil the onions until tender, which will take 30 to 60 minutes depending on their size and age.

Serve

  1. Optionally, serve with ½ cup of sauce (272).

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 + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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

Button onions
Softens and turns sweet as it boils, giving the sauce its mild flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling until tender. Onion size and age change how long they take, so timing varies. Heat slowly breaks down the onion's cell walls, softening it. Check tenderness with a knife rather than relying on the clock alone.

“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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