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Spanish Onions Boiled

Boiled onions served with a thickened milk and flour sauce seasoned with salt, pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Onions Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the onion

  1. Peel the onion and place it in a pot of boiling salted water with the sugar.

  2. Boil the onion for 1.5 hours if it weighs 1 lb, 1 hour if it weighs ½ lb, or 45 minutes if it weighs ¾ lb.

  3. Drain the onion and mix the flour, milk, salt, and pepper in a small pan.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Heat the mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly until it thickens.

  2. Pour the sauce over the onion 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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Onion
Is the main vegetable, becoming soft and sweet as it boils.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and gives it richness.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness to the boiling water and onion.

The step that matters

Stirring the sauce while it heats. Flour mixed into cold milk can clump if not stirred constantly. Constant stirring over medium heat disperses the starch so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, pepper, sugar. 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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