Skip to main content
Main

Onions a L'etuvee

A French dish of stewed onions simmered in a brown butter and wine sauce, served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Onions a L'etuvee

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, mix flour and butter until brown.

  2. Moisten with red wine and stock.

Stew and serve

  1. Add boiled onions, salt, parsley, chives, cloves, thyme, and bay leaf.

  2. Let onions stew in the sauce for 10 minutes.

  3. Serve with slices of bread.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Chive + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce while the flour cooks in it.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the sauce.
Onions
Become soft and sweet as they stew in the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix flour and butter until brown. Cooking the flour in the butter builds a roux. If it is pulled off the heat too early it stays pasty and tastes raw, and if it burns it turns bitter. Stirring keeps it even so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, red wine, parsley, chive, clove, thyme):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, red wine, parsley, chive, clove, thyme. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes