Skip to main content
Main

Onions Stewed in Wine

Onions stewed in wine with herbs, cloves, and bay leaf, served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and red wine work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 849 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Onions Stewed in Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions with sweet herbs, salt, cloves, and bay leaf for 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the onions and place them in a stew pan.

Stew and serve

  1. Add salt, butter rolled in flour, and red wine to the pan.

  2. Stew for another 15 minutes.

  3. Serve garnished with toast dipped in the 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. Clove + red winetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + red winetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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
Form the main body of the dish, softening as they cook in the wine sauce.
Red wine
Provides liquid and acidity, and flavour that builds the stewing sauce.
Butter and flour
Rolled together, the flour thickens the butter-enriched wine into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter rolled in flour. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps; coating it in butter first lets it disperse evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of lumping.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, butter, flour, red wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, butter, flour, red wine. 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