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Sauce

Fine Onion Sauce

A creamy onion sauce made with onions, flour, fat, butter, egg yolk, and beef extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,092 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fine Onion Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel and chop the onions into small pieces.

  2. In a pan, heat the fat and fry the onions until brown.

  3. Stir in the flour and cook for a minute.

Make the sauce

  1. Add enough water to achieve your desired sauce consistency and boil slowly.

  2. Strain the mixture through a sieve and return to the heat.

  3. Add nutmeg and salt to taste.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the butter, egg yolk, and Liebig's extract of beef.

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 + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce as they brown and soften.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the fat and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy finish to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce gently when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk thickens by gently coagulating; if the sauce is too hot when it is added, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy. Removing the pan from the heat first lets it blend smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, nutmeg, butter, egg, beef. 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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