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Beetroot and Onions with Sauce Piquante

A dish of boiled beetroot and onions served with a piquant sauce of butter, cream, arrowroot, vinegar, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beetroot and Onions with Sauce Piquante

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the beetroots and button onions until tender, then let them cool.

  2. Peel the beetroots and slice them.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, chop the ordinary onion and fry it in butter until brown.

  2. Thicken the fried onion with arrowroot.

  3. Stir in the cream.

  4. Stew the sliced beetroot in the sauce for ten minutes.

  5. Remove from heat and add vinegar, pepper, and salt.

Serve

  1. Serve the onions in the center with the beetroot and sauce around it.

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. Beetroot + arrowroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Beetroot + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,261 recipes

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

  4. Onion + arrowroottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beetroots
Provide the main body, colour and earthy sweetness of the dish.
Button onions
Add tender texture and mild sweetness as the centrepiece.
Butter
Fat that browns the chopped onion, adding rich, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Arrowroot
Starch that thickens the sauce to a smooth, glossy consistency.
Cream
Adds richness and smooths the sauce's body and mouthfeel.
Chili vinegar
Adds acidity and heat that sharpen the sauce and cut its richness.

The step that matters

Thicken the fried onion with arrowroot. Arrowroot must be mixed in well and the sauce kept from boiling hard, since starch thickens as it heats and can turn lumpy or thin if overworked or overheated.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, onion, butter, cream, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, onion, butter, cream, vinegar, pepper. 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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