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Dessert

Onion Cake

A baked cake made with curd, milk, onions, butter, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Onion Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix curd with good rich milk until it reaches the consistency of cottage cheese.

  2. Fry sliced onions in butter until soft, then add to the cheese mixture.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt.

Bake

  1. Bake in pastry.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Milk + oniontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Curd
Forms the body and tangy, moist base of the filling.
Good rich milk
Loosens the curd to a soft, creamy texture.
Sliced onions
Softened onions add sweetness and savory aroma to the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and helps soften the onions while they cook.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until soft before adding them. Onions release a lot of water as they cook. Cooking them until soft drives off some of that moisture, so the cheese mixture does not turn watery and loose when baked.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter. 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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