Skip to main content
Main

Braised Onions

Braised onions simmered in butter or oil until tender.

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

Braised Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and trim the onions.

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

Braise and serve

  1. Add the onions and fry until nicely browned.

  2. Add 1 cup of water and cover the pan.

  3. Simmer until the onions are tender, about 20 minutes.

  4. Serve the onions with the cooking liquid.

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
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a sweet, tender texture when simmered.
Butter or olive oil
Conducts heat for frying and adds fat that helps the onions brown and carry flavour.
Water
Creates steam and a cooking liquid that softens the onions during covered simmering.

The step that matters

Frying the onions until nicely browned. Browning develops deep, sweet flavours through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. If the pan is too crowded or too cool, the onions steam instead of browning, and the dish loses that depth.

“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