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Plain Boiled Onions or Creahed Onions

Creamed onions are onions simmered with milk, butter, and flour until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Plain Boiled Onions or Creahed Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Skin and soak the onions in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Put the onions in a saucepan and cover with boiling water, adding a generous amount of salt.

  3. When nearly done, pour off the water and add the milk and butter.

  4. Simmer until the onions are tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For creamed onions, drain the onions thoroughly.

  2. In a separate pan, cook the butter and flour together to make a thickening.

  3. Pour the thickening over the onions in a deep dish.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 and soften into a tender, mildly sweet vegetable when simmered.
Milk
Adds moisture and a creamy liquid base for the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and then combined with the liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the butter and flour together. Cooking flour in melted butter coats the starch granules so they disperse smoothly into the liquid without lumps. Undercooked flour tastes raw and gives a weaker, pasty thickening.

Swap the onion

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

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

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