Skip to main content
Dessert

Onion Pie

A pie of onions and apples with sage, butter, water, salt, and sugar, baked in a crust.

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

Why it works: Apple and sage work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 755 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Onion Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Remove the outer skins from the onions.

  2. Boil the onions for 10 minutes, then drain and cut into small pieces.

  3. Pare, core, and slice the apples over the onions.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the onions in a deep pie dish.

  2. Add sage, butter, a little water, and salt to the onions.

  3. Sprinkle lightly with sugar.

  4. Cover with a pie crust and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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. Apple + sagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sage + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,312 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 filling and turn soft and sweet as they cook.
Apples
Add moisture and gentle sweetness, softening into the filling as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and keeping the filling moist.
Dry sage
Provides the herbal aroma and savory flavor that define the pie.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to give a golden top.

The step that matters

Boil and drain the onions. Boiling softens the onions and mellows their sharp flavor so they cook through with the apples. Draining well matters because excess water would thin the filling and make the crust soggy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sage, butter, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sage, butter, sugar. 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

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes