Skip to main content
Main

Baked Onions

Baked onions are boiled, cooled, sliced, and baked with butter until tender and browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Baked Onions

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions in salted water for 15 minutes.

  2. Transfer them to cold water for 1-2 hours, then drain well.

  3. Cut the onions into 1-2 inch thick slices.

  4. Place the slices in a single layer in a well buttered baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until tender and browned, basting occasionally with butter.

  2. Serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Spanish onions
Provide the main body and sweetness that turns mellow and tender when baked.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the onion surfaces brown while keeping them moist.

The step that matters

Bake at 400°F until tender and browned. Onions need enough time at high heat for their sugars to caramelize and browning to develop. Baking too briefly leaves them pale and firm, while basting with butter helps prevent the surfaces from drying out.

“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.

More baked onions recipes

Spanish 5 See all 50 →

You might also like

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