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Stewed Spanish Onions

A stew of onions, bacon, herbs, spices, and stock, finished with a thickened butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Stewed Spanish Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel the onions and partially boil them in salted water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain and wipe them dry.

Stew

  1. In a stewpan, add bacon, sweet herbs, cloves, and peppercorns.

  2. Cut the onions in half and add them.

  3. Cover with clear stock and boil gently for 2 hours or until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve into a smaller saucepan.

  2. Skim off the fat and boil until thickened.

  3. Keep the onions warm by the fire.

  4. Serve the onions on a hot dish and pour the reduced sauce 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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

Spanish onions
Become tender during slow stewing and form the body of the dish.
Bacon
Adds savoury, smoky flavour to the stock as it simmers with the onions.
Butter rolled in flour
Thickens the strained liquid into a smooth, glossy sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, rounder texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 2 hours. A gentle simmer lets the onions soften evenly and turns their sugars mellow without breaking them apart. A hard boil can break the onions up and make the stock cloudy.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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