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Baked Onions

A dish of onions cooked in salted water, wrapped in buttered paper, baked until tender and browned, served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Baked Onions

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Wash the onions but do not peel them.

  2. Boil the onions in salted water for one hour, changing the water twice.

  3. Once tender, drain the onions on a cloth.

Bake and serve

  1. Wrap each onion in buttered tissue paper, twisting the top.

  2. Bake the wrapped onions for one hour in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C).

  3. Peel and brown the onions before serving.

  4. Serve with melted butter.

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, becoming soft and sweet as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the onion surfaces brown; also served melted over the finished onions.

The step that matters

Peel and brown the onions before serving. The onions must be tender after boiling and baking, so browning is done on the surface only. Browning relies on the sugars and proteins at the surface reacting under heat, so the onion should be dry and buttered for an even golden colour.

“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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