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Braised Onions

Braised onions simmered in butter or olive oil with water until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Braised Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Peel and slice the onions.

  2. In a frying pan, heat the butter or olive oil over medium heat.

  3. Add the onions and fry until nicely browned.

Braise and serve

  1. Pour in the boiling water, cover with a plate, and let cook for 1 hour.

  2. Serve the onions with the cooking liquid.

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. 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 dish's main body and, as they cook down, provide sweetness.
Butter or olive oil
Conducts heat for frying and carries flavour, helping the onions brown.
Boiling water
Creates moist steam and a cooking liquid that softens the onions during braising.

The step that matters

Fry the onions until nicely browned. Browning drives Maillard reactions and caramelisation, which build the deep, sweet flavour of the dish. Pale onions taste flat, while heat that is too high can scorch them before they soften.

“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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