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Onion Soup, Cheap

A simple onion soup made with onions, butter, rice flour, water, salt, pepper, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,433 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Onion Soup, Cheap

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the onions into small pieces.

  2. In a stewpan, melt the butter and sauté the onions until well cooked.

Make the soup

  1. Mix the rice flour smoothly with the water, then add it to the onions.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar, and simmer until the onions are tender.

  3. Thicken the soup with a mixture of butter and flour, then 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 + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,433 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Provide the main body and sweet, savory flavor of the soup as they cook down.
Butter
Adds fat for sautéing the onions and enriches the soup's flavor and mouthfeel.
Rice flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks, giving it a smoother body.
Powdered sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that helps balance and deepen the caramelized onion flavor.

The step that matters

Sauté the onions until well cooked. Slowly cooking the onions in butter drives off moisture and browns their natural sugars, which builds the deep flavor of the soup. Rushing this step leaves the soup tasting raw and flat.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, rice, flour, pepper, sugar. 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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