Skip to main content
Main

Onions, Spanish, Baked

Baked onions cooked in water, wrapped in buttered paper, served with cold butter and pepper or gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Onions, Spanish, Baked

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Parboil

  1. Put the onions, with their skins on, into a saucepan of boiling water, slightly salted.

  2. Boil quickly for 1 hour.

  3. Remove the onions, wipe them thoroughly, and wrap each one in a piece of buttered paper.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours, or longer if the onions are very large.

  2. Serve in their skins with cold butter and a seasoning of pepper and salt, or peel and pour brown gravy over them.

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

Spanish onions
Become tender and sweet as their starches and sugars soften during long cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, melting over the hot onions to carry flavour.

The step that matters

Wrapping the onions in buttered paper before baking. Wrapping keeps the onions moist in the dry oven heat, so the flesh steams and becomes tender instead of drying out or scorching while the long bake runs.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes