Name: Soubise Sauce
Ingredients: onions; fresh butter; coarse sea salt; flour; fine bread crumbs; cream or milk; sugar (optional)

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Soubise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the onions in boiling water for 10 minutes.
Peel and cut the onions in halves or quarters.
In a small saucepan, melt a lump of fresh butter.
Add the onions and simmer very slowly until fully cooked.
Add coarse sea salt to taste.
Thicken the sauce with flour or a mixture of flour and fine bread crumbs.
Stir in cream or milk until smooth.
Pass the sauce through a sieve to ensure it is thick and smooth.
Optionally, add a pinch of sugar.

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.

Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + sugartop 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

Swap the onion

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

Leekfits better
Arrowrootfits better
Shallotfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, bread, cream, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.