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Onions, Pickled

Pickled onions boiled and served in a butter‑flour‑milk‑cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Onions, Pickled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Place peeled onions in cold water and bring to a boil, then strain.

  2. Return onions to the saucepan with boiling water to cover and add salt; boil until tender, about 1 hour.

  3. Drain and chop onions coarsely.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Melt butter in a saucepan, stir in flour, and cook for 2-3 minutes.

  2. Add milk and stir until it boils.

  3. Add chopped onions, season to taste, and simmer for a few minutes.

  4. Stir in cream and 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.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Onions
Form the main bulk and, once cooked until tender, provide mild sweetness.
Butter
Provides fat and rich flavor and forms the base of the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter before the milk is added.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it comes to a boil.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier body to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the butter and flour before adding milk. Cooking the flour in butter for 2-3 minutes cooks off its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding milk too early can leave lumps and a floury flavor.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, cream. 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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