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Stewed Onions

A stew of button onions, ham, flour, stock, butter, and meat extract, garnished with fried bread croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Stewed Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the onions

  1. Boil the button onions in salted water for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, fry the ham, butter, and flour together.

  2. Add the brown stock and extract of meat, and cook for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Garnish with croutons of fried bread.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Ham + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Ham + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Flour and butter 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

Button onions
Form the main vegetable body of the dish, becoming soft and sweet when simmered.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the fat and flour base.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce once cooked in fat.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce base with fat.
Brown stock
Provides the liquid that becomes the body of the sauce.
Extract of meat
Deepens the meaty savour of the stock and sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the ham, butter, and flour together. Cooking flour in fat until it loses its raw taste lets it thicken smoothly. Adding stock to this cooked roux while stirring helps prevent lumps and a floury flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, flour, butter, meat, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, flour, butter, meat, pepper. 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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