Home › Vegetables › Stuffed Spanish Onions
Stuffed Spanish Onions
Parboil a Spanish onion, take out the center and fill with force-meat, cover with a thin slice of sweet, fat pork, sprinkle with a teaspoonful of salt and the same of sugar, add four teaspoonfuls of stock, cover closely and cook over a good fire. When the onion is done remove the pork, strain and skim the gravy and pour it over and serve. The best force-meat is made of cold chicken, a shred of ham, a little chopped parsley, half a dozen mushrooms, all chopped well and mixed with a tablespoonful of butter, pepper and salt. Delicious.
The text as printed has suffered in typesetting — several phrases repeat mid-sentence — but the method underneath is clear: a hollowed onion braised in a covered pan with a chicken forcemeat inside and a slice of pork fat over the top. Read past the stutters and it works.
- The garbled lines"a teaspoonful of a teaspoonful of salt" means one teaspoon of salt, and "cover closely stock, cover closely" is a single instruction to cover the pan tightly. Nothing is missing except the punctuation.
- Spanish onionA large mild onion, sold today as Spanish or sweet onion. The recipe specifies only the one. Peel but leave the root end intact so the shell holds together.
- Parboiling and hollowingThe recipe gives no time; a large onion will want something in the region of a quarter of an hour, until a skewer meets slight resistance at the center — fully soft and it collapses when you scoop it. Cool before coring, then remove the inner layers with a melon baller or paring knife, leaving three or four layers as a wall.
- Force-meatHere it means a bound stuffing of already-cooked meat, not raw sausage. Cold roast chicken, a shred of ham, mushrooms and parsley chopped fine and worked together with a tablespoon of softened butter — the butter is the binder, so keep the mixture cool until it goes into the onion.
- "Sweet, fat pork"Unsmoked pork fat: fresh fatback or a thin slice of unsmoked salt pork, rinsed. It bastes the onion and is lifted off before serving. Bacon substitutes but brings smoke and cure the dish was not built around.
- Four teaspoonfuls of stockBarely more than a tablespoon, which is correct — the onion steams in its own moisture under a tight lid. If your pan is wide or the lid loose, use a few tablespoons and check partway that it has not gone dry.
- "A good fire"Period usage points to a brisk rather than a gentle heat, though under a tight lid a steady simmer is what the dish wants; note that the recipe is cooked over the fire and gives no oven direction. Allow 30-40 minutes covered. The onion is done when a knife slides through the outer wall without resistance.
- The gravyThere will be only a few spoonfuls. Strain it, skim the pork fat off the top, and reduce briefly if it tastes thin — the onion gives up enough sweet liquid to make it worth the trouble.
Stuffed onions belong to a wide nineteenth-century family of vegetables treated as containers — stuffed cucumbers, stuffed tomatoes, stuffed cabbage leaves — that let a cook stretch a small quantity of cooked meat into a dish worth putting on a plate. The forcemeat here is explicitly leftovers: cold chicken, a shred of ham, half a dozen mushrooms, the sort of remnants a household with a Sunday roast would have on Monday. The name "Spanish onion" reflects the mild large-bulb onions imported into Britain and North America from Spain and the Canary Islands through the later 1800s, prized precisely because they were sweet enough to eat in quantity rather than merely as seasoning. "Force-meat" itself comes from the French farce, stuffing, by way of a long English mangling.