Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Onions

Boiled onions served with cream, melted butter, and black pepper.

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

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the onions

  1. Peel the onions and place them in a stew pan.

  2. Cover the onions with hot water and cook for about 20 minutes.

  3. Drain the water and refill with hot water, adding a little salt.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cooked, drain again and pour 1 cup of cream and melted butter over the onions. Let it sit for a few minutes.

  2. Season with black pepper 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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (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 + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,827 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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
Soften as they cook, becoming milder and sweeter, and form the body of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture that coats the onions.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, buttery flavor.

The step that matters

Drain the onions well after boiling. Onions hold a lot of cooking water. Draining them thoroughly before adding the cream keeps the sauce from thinning and becoming watery, so it clings to the onions.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes