Skip to main content
Main

Onion Soup, Gaebure

A baked onion soup with toasted bread, clarified butter, salt, pepper, and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Onion Soup, Gaebure

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Cut the ends off the onions, peel, and slice them into pieces 1/8 inch thick.

  2. In a flat saucepan, heat clarified butter and fry the onions until light brown.

Layer and bake

  1. In a deep baking dish, layer toasted bread and onions, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  2. Continue layering with toast and onions until the dish is full.

  3. Moisten the layers with broth and place in the oven to gratinate.

Serve

  1. Serve with a soup tureen of good beef broth.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Onion + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,676 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

White onions
Provide the main body and sweetness as they soften and brown in butter.
Clarified butter
Fat that fries the onions to a golden color and adds rich flavor.
Toasted bread
Soaks up broth and holds the layers together, giving the dish body.
Broth
Adds moisture and savory flavor to the layers as they bake.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until light brown. Onions cooked too briefly stay sharp and pale, while slow browning develops sweetness and depth of flavor that carries the whole soup.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

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

More onion soup recipes

French 31Brown 15with Milk 7White 5Bavarian 4Bermuda 4 See all 236 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes