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To Stew Onion

A dish of onions stewed in butter, weak gravy, pepper, and salt, lightly floured before cooking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mint and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,372 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Stew Onion

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the large onions.

  2. Fry them gently in butter until they are a fine brown, but do not blacken them.

Stew

  1. Put the onions into a small pan with weak gravy, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cover and stew for two hours on low heat.

  3. Lightly flour the onions before stewing.

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. Mint + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,372 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  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

Large onions
Form the main body of the dish and turn soft and sweet during slow cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and helps the onions brown during frying, building savoury flavour.
Weak gravy
Supplies liquid that keeps the onions moist while they stew.
Flour
Lightly coats the onions, helping the cooking liquid thicken around them.

The step that matters

Fry gently until fine brown without blackening. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction and caramelisation of sugars in the onions. Gentle heat develops rich flavour, while blackened onions turn bitter and taste burnt.

Swap the mint

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Mintthe original

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