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Stewed Onions

A dish of onions stewed in stock, finished with a browned butter and flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stewed Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Remove the skins from the onions and soak them in cold water.

  2. Place the onions in a saucepan and cover with stock.

  3. Stew slowly for 1 hour if young, or 2 hours if large and old, until tender.

  4. Drain the onions and transfer them to a vegetable dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter until browned.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Gradually stir in the ½ pint of stock from boiling the onions and bring to a boil.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, then pour over the onions and serve.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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
Become tender and sweet through slow stewing, forming the dish's main body.
Butter
Adds fat and nutty, browned flavour to the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Stock
Provides liquid for stewing the onions and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stewing until tender. Stewing slowly lets the onion's starches and cell walls soften evenly without breaking apart. Older, larger onions need the longer time, so testing for tenderness matters more than following the clock.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, 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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