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Boiled Onions
After taking off the outer skin let them soak in cold water for a couple of hours, or longer if you like them mild; let them be cooked in boiling water, which should be pretty strongly salted; drain off the water as soon as they are almost done, then let them simmer in milk until quite tender; -Mrs. P. L. quite tender ; add a good bit of butter, pepper and salt.
A straightforward two-stage method: onions are boiled in salted water, then finished in milk with butter. The original gives no quantities, times or yield, so the notes below fill in the gaps.
- The hinge: drain before they are doneThe onions must come out of the water while still slightly firm, or they collapse in the milk stage and shed their layers. Test with a skewer — it should meet resistance at the centre.
- Choosing the onionsSmall to medium yellow onions of even size, peeled but left whole with the root end left intact, hold their shape best. Roughly 2 lb will serve four as a side dish.
- The cold soakTwo hours in cold water is said to draw out some of the pungency and give a milder, sweeter result; the recipe itself ties the soak to mildness ('or longer if you like them mild'). It is optional rather than structural; skipping it gives a more assertive onion.
- TimingsWhole medium onions may need 20-30 minutes in boiling salted water to reach the almost-done stage, then 10-15 minutes in milk to finish; test rather than trust the clock. Small pickling onions need considerably less.
- Simmering in milkUse just enough milk to come halfway up the onions and keep it at a bare simmer in a wide pan. Milk scorches on a dry pan bottom and boils over readily, so keep the heat low and do not cover tightly.
- Salt twice, lightlyThe boiling water is meant to be "pretty strongly salted" and the onions absorb some of it. Season the finished dish at the end, after tasting, rather than by the original's instruction alone.
- "A good bit of butter"Read this as 2 to 3 tablespoons for 2 lb of onions, stirred in off the heat. The recipe calls for no flour, but if you want the milk thickened into a sauce, working a spoonful of flour into the butter first is one common way of doing it.
Boiled onions served in milk or a milk-thickened sauce are generally traced well back in Anglo-American cooking, and in compilations like this one they had settled into the standard repertoire of boiled vegetables that accompanied roast meat — creamed onions of this kind are still the traditional partner to American holiday turkey. The milk finish does real work: it tempers the sharpness that plain boiling leaves behind, and the soak-then-boil-then-simmer sequence reflects a period preoccupation with making onions "mild," a concern that appears repeatedly in nineteenth-century cookery writing. The attribution to "Mrs. P. L." suggests a contributed recipe, the sort often said to be gathered from readers or club members, which may be why it reads as a set of remembered habits rather than a measured formula. The garbled repetition in the text is presumably a transmission fault of some kind, common in books of this type assembled quickly from many hands.