Name: Broiled Onion
Ingredients: 1 large Spanish onion; coarse sea salt; 2 tablespoons melted butter; buttered toast

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 ↓

Broiled Onion

Ingredients

1 large Spanish onion
coarse sea salt
2 tablespoons melted butter
buttered toast

Directions

Slice the onion and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.
Sauté in melted butter until browned on each side.
Serve on rounds of buttered toast.

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.

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

Spanish onion: Forms the main body of the dish, softening and sweetening as it cooks and browns.
Melted butter: Conducts heat for sautéing and adds fat that promotes browning and rich flavor.

The step that matters

Sauté until browned on each side. Browning develops sweetness and deep flavor through the Maillard reaction. Onions cooked too quickly or with too little fat can scorch before browning evenly, or stay pale and steamed if the pan is crowded or not hot enough.

“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.