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Portugal Onions, Roasted

Roasted onions basted with butter, served with or without sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Portugal Onions, Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the onions.

  2. Place them in a Dutch oven before a good fire.

Roast and serve

  1. Baste frequently with dissolved butter.

  2. Roast for 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve with or without their own sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Their natural sugars caramelize during roasting, becoming soft, sweet and golden.
Butter
Fat carries heat to the surface, adding richness and helping the onions brown.

The step that matters

Basting with dissolved butter. Regular basting keeps the onion surfaces from drying out. The fat transfers heat evenly and carries flavour, while the milk solids in butter help the exterior brown. Skipping it can leave the outside dry and pale.

“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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