Skip to main content
Main

Brown Onion Sauce

A savory sauce made with onions, butter, flour, stock, and Marmite.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Brown Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the base

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the chopped onions. Fry until they are pale brown.

  2. Stir in the flour and fry for an additional minute.

Simmer and finish

  1. Gradually add the stock and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the Marmite and simmer slowly until the onions are cooked.

  3. Season to taste and use as required.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 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
Soften and turn sweet and browned, giving the sauce its main flavour.
Butter
Carries the frying onions and adds richness and rounded flavour.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smoother, lightly bodied sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Marmite
Adds savoury, salty depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the stock gradually. Flour fried in butter forms a roux, and adding liquid slowly lets it disperse evenly. Adding it all at once can leave lumps, so the sauce stays smooth as it thickens.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes