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Bermuda Onions with Butter Sauce
Peel the desired number of Bermuda onions. Cover with boiling water. Heat to boiling point, boil five minutes, drain; repeat. Then cover with boiling salted water, and cook until tender (from forty-five minutes to one hour). Drain well. Dot over with bits of butter, finely chopped parsley, and pepper. Serve hot.
A plain boiled vegetable dish that lives or dies on two things: how sweet the onion is to begin with, and how thoroughly it is drained at the end.
- The two changes of waterBlanching twice for five minutes each and discarding the water draws out some of the pungent sulfur compounds and mellows the smell; without it the finished onions taste sharper.
- Cooking time runs longForty-five minutes to an hour implies large whole onions; the recipe itself gives no size. Smaller sweet onions of around 3 inches should be tender well before that after the blanching, so test with a thin knife at the center rather than watching the clock.
- Finding the onionTrue Bermudas are no longer a commercial crop. Any large flat sweet onion stands in: Vidalia, Walla Walla, Texas 1015, or a Spanish onion if nothing sweeter is available. Avoid ordinary yellow storage onions, which stay pungent through all that boiling.
- "Butter sauce" is not a sauceThe title promises more than the method delivers. The finish is simply cold butter dotted over the hot drained onions with parsley and pepper, melting into whatever moisture clings to them. Allow roughly a tablespoon of butter per onion.
- Drain hardBoiled onions hold water between their layers. Leave them in the colander several minutes before dishing, or the butter will float on a pool of liquid.
- SaltOnly the third water is salted; the reasoning usually given is that salt in the blanching water works against the leaching you are trying to encourage, though that is inference rather than demonstrated. Salt the final water well.
- YieldOne large onion per person as a side dish.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the era when the Bermuda onion was a widely traded seasonal import in American markets. The onions were grown on Bermuda from seed generally traced to the Canary Islands, and shipped north in spring; they were prized for being mild enough to eat raw or to serve whole as a vegetable in their own right, something no storage onion could manage. By the time this book appeared the name had begun to drift, as Texas growers raised similar flat sweet types and sold them under the same label, and the Bermuda trade itself faded. Serving a boiled vegetable dressed with nothing but butter, parsley and pepper suits a period in which the sauce belonged to the meat and the vegetables were expected to taste of themselves.