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Baked Onions
-Mrs. P. L.
Wash and skin very large onions; parboil half an hour; drain, push out the hearts, chopping them fine with a little bacon, add bread crumbs, bread crumbs, season with pepper and salt, and moisten with a little cream. Fill the cream. onions with this, put into a dripping pan with very little water, and cook until tender in a slow oven, basting often with melted butter.
A straightforward stuffed onion, and the method still works; the vaguest points are the oven and the size of the onions.
- Slow ovenRead this as somewhere around 300F. The onions are already parboiled, so the oven is only softening them through and setting the stuffing; the recipe says simply to cook until tender, which for very large onions will take roughly an hour.
- Choose the right onion"very large" is all the recipe gives; use the biggest onions you can get, so there is enough wall left after the centre comes out. One per person as a side dish.
- ParboilingHalf an hour, as written, after washing and skinning; keep the root end intact so they hold together. Drain them and let them cool enough to handle before pushing out the hearts.
- Pushing out the heartsCut a thin slice from the top and work the inner layers out with a spoon or a small knife, leaving two or three outer layers as a shell. Keep the base intact or the filling escapes.
- The baconChop it raw and fine with the onion hearts as written, or render it first if you want the fat out; cured pork of the period was often more heavily salted than modern supermarket bacon, so taste before adding salt.
- Moisten lightlyCream is there to bind, not to make a sauce. A tablespoon or two for four onions is enough; a wet stuffing will slump and boil rather than brown.
- Basting and the panVery little water in the pan means a scant quarter inch, topped up if it dries. Basting with melted butter every fifteen minutes is what colours the tops, so do not skip it, or cover for the first half hour and uncover to finish.
Baked or stuffed onions belong to a long line of English and American kitchen-garden cookery in which a vegetable is hollowed, filled with its own trimmings plus crumbs and a little cured pork, and returned to the oven. The pattern reflects a household economy where nothing edible was discarded: the hearts scooped from the shell become the body of the stuffing, and bread crumbs stretch a few ounces of bacon across a whole dish. Some turn-of-the-century American cookbooks drew on contributions from local women, which is why so many entries carry a name rather than an author's byline, and onions were among the most reliable winter keepers in the cellar.