Skip to main content
Main

To Bake Onions

A dish of onions baked with butter, breadcrumbs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Bake Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions in water or a mixture of milk and water, seasoned with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Once soft enough to mash, remove from heat and mash the onions with butter.

Bake

  1. Sprinkle bread crumbs over the mashed onions and place in a baking dish.

  2. Alternatively, place the whole onions in the baking dish with butter and bread crumbs.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. 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

Onions
Provide the bulk of the dish and, once softened, a sweet, mild flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping the mashed onions brown lightly.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping that adds texture over the soft onions.
Milk
Adds richness and a mild sweetness to the boiling liquid, softening the onions gently.

The step that matters

Boiling until soft enough to mash. Onions must be cooked fully soft so they mash smoothly; undercooked onions stay firm and sharp. Overcooking in too much liquid can leave them watery and diluted in flavour.

Swap the onion

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

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

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

More baked onions recipes

Spanish 5 See all 50 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes