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Stuffed Onions

A baked dish of onions filled with ham, bread crumbs, butter, and cream, topped with cracker crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Stuffed Onions

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the onions

  1. Boil the onions for 1 hour and let them cool.

  2. Cut a piece from the center of each onion with a sharp knife.

Fill and bake

  1. Mix the chopped ham, stale bread crumbs, melted butter, cream or milk, salt, and cayenne together.

  2. Fill the cavities of the onions with the mixture.

  3. Sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs and bake at 300°F (150°C) for 30 minutes.

  4. Serve with white sauce.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  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
Hold the filling as edible cups and provide the main body and sweet flavor of the dish.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb the butter and cream, giving the filling body and a soft, moist texture.
Melted butter
Adds fat for richness and carries flavor through the filling.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture so the bread crumbs soften into a spoonable filling.
Chopped ham
Contributes savory, salty flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Cut a piece from the center of each onion. Removing too little leaves no room for the filling, while cutting too deep can break the onion wall and let filling leak out during baking. Boiling first softens the layers so they cut and fold cleanly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, bread, butter, cream, 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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