Skip to main content
Side

Young Onions

A creamy dish of boiled young onions simmered with butter, milk, corn starch, salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Young Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Cut off the stems and tops of the onions.

  2. Skin the onions.

  3. Cook the onions in plenty of boiling water for 15 minutes.

Make the cream

  1. Melt the butter over low heat in another saucepan.

  2. Add the onions and chopped parsley to the saucepan.

  3. Warm slowly for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir salt, pepper, and corn starch into the milk.

  5. Add the milk to the saucepan.

  6. Simmer for 3 minutes, stirring several times.

  7. Pour out to 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Pepper + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 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

Young onions
Provide the main body and sweet, mellow flavour of the cream.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the onions warm gently.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes the creamy texture.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it simmers, giving the cream body.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch to the milk. Corn starch clumps if it hits hot liquid unmixed. Stirring it fully into the cold milk first lets it disperse evenly, so it thickens smoothly when the milk is simmered.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, pepper, corn, parsley. 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

Onion PuddingOnion Pudding9 recipesEggplant CakesEggplant Cakes34 recipesEscalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)Escalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)25 recipesParsnip CroquettesParsnip Croquettes12 recipes