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Braized Onions

Braised onions are onions cooked slowly in butter or oil with water until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Braized Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the onions.

  2. In a frying pan, heat the butter or olive oil over medium heat.

Braise

  1. Add the onions and fry until nicely browned.

  2. Pour in the boiling water and cover the pan with a plate.

  3. Cook for 1 hour until the onions are tender.

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

Onions
Provide the main body of the dish, softening into tender, sweet strands as they cook.
Butter or olive oil
Conducts heat into the onions and carries flavour, helping them brown in the pan.
Boiling water
Creates steam under the cover so the onions braise gently and finish tender.

The step that matters

Frying until nicely browned. Browning the onions in fat before adding water builds caramelised, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Pale onions taste flatter, so give them time to colour before adding liquid.

“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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