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Escaloped Onions

Onions are sliced, cooked, layered with bread crumbs, seasoned, and baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Escaloped Onions

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the onions

  1. Slice the onions as for frying.

  2. Cook the onions in water for a few minutes, then drain.

Layer and bake

  1. In a pan, layer the onions and sprinkle with bread crumbs.

  2. Season each layer with coarse sea salt, black pepper, butter, and cream or milk.

  3. Bake in the oven at 400°F (200°C) until browned.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Form the bulk of the dish and become soft and sweet as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Add a light, absorbent layer that helps the top brown and crisp.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top layer brown in the oven.
Cream or milk
Provides moisture and richness that bind the layers into a tender, custard-like texture.

The step that matters

Drain the onions well after parboiling. Excess water left on the onions thins the cream or milk and keeps the dish soggy instead of letting the layers set and brown.

Swap the onion

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

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

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