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Sauce

Soubise Sauce

A creamy onion sauce made with butter, flour, milk, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Soubise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil onions until soft, then strain the water away.

  2. Add butter to the onions and heat until hot, then cover and finish cooking without browning.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir in flour and pour in milk, stirring until it boils.

  2. Let it boil for 2-3 minutes, then rub through a sieve.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Cooked soft and pureed, they give the sauce its body and sweet, mild flavour.
Butter
Fat that softens the onions and carries flavour through the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Starch that thickens the milk into a smooth, coating sauce as it boils.
Milk
Liquid base that, with the flour, forms the creamy body of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds a small amount of acidity that brightens the rich, creamy flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and milk until it boils. Flour must be stirred in evenly so it does not clump; once the starch heats in liquid it thickens, and lumps are hard to remove, so constant stirring keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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