Name: Boiled Onions, with Butter or Cream Sauce
Ingredients: Onions; 3 tablespoons Butter or Cream sauce

Why it works: Onion and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,912 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Boiled Onions, with Butter or Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Onions
3 tablespoons Butter or Cream sauce

Directions

Boil the onions until tender.
Drain the water.
Add 3 tablespoons of butter or cream sauce.
Let them simmer for 5 minutes.
Serve.

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.

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: Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender as they boil.
Butter or cream sauce: Adds richness and moisture, coating the onions as they simmer.

“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.