Home › November › Creamed Onions
Creamed Onions
Remove the skins from one dozen medium-sized onions, under water - to prevent the odor from penetrating the fingers-or grease the fingers before beginning to peel them. Drain, place them in a sauce-pan, and cover with cold water; bring quickly to the boilingpoint and boil five minutes. Drain and cover with boiling salted water; let cook uncovered until tender (about one hour), but not broken. Prepare a thin cream sauce made as follows:
A straightforward vegetable side, but the timing belongs to an era of larger, older storage onions and the sauce recipe is cut off mid-sentence.
- The hinge: change the waterThe five-minute boil in cold-started water, drained and replaced with fresh boiling salted water, is the whole point of the method. It carries off the harshest sulfur compounds so the finished onions taste sweet rather than sharp under the cream sauce.
- One hour is too longOne hour may be too long -- modern medium yellow or white onions are often tender well before the hour after the water change. Start testing with a skewer at 20 to 25 minutes and stop when they yield, since the recipe itself warns against letting them break.
- Keep the pot uncoveredThis is not incidental. Period cookery held that a lid traps the sulfurous steam and returns it to the onions, and a covered pot is in any case more likely to boil hard enough to break them apart.
- The missing thin cream sauceThe instructions end at the colon. A thin white sauce of the period is 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup milk, cooked a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste, seasoned with salt and white pepper, sometimes with a grating of nutmeg. That quantity is light for a dozen onions; doubling it to 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour with 2 cups milk keeps the same thin proportions and sauces them properly.
- Peeling under waterThe trick works, and it is commonly advised to trim the root end last, on the grounds that the basal plate is the most irritating part. Greasing the fingers is unnecessary if you peel under running water.
- Choosing onionsPick onions of uniform size, roughly 2 inches across, so they finish together. Small boiling onions or peeled frozen pearl onions are the usual modern substitute and need far less time again, about 10 minutes.
- YieldA dozen medium onions serves six to eight as a side dish. Drain them well before saucing, or the sauce thins out on the plate.
Creamed onions were a fixture of the American autumn and winter table, and the reason is no mystery: onions were a keeping vegetable, cured and stored in the cellar after harvest, and available long after fresh greens had gone. Dressing a boiled vegetable in a flour-thickened white sauce was the standard genteel treatment in turn-of-the-century American cookery, where a mastered basic sauce was expected to serve a dozen different vegetables. The dish is still most often met at Thanksgiving. The advice on peeling under water is the sort of household hint these books traded in constantly, and it rests on sound chemistry: the compounds released by a cut onion are water-soluble and volatile, so submerging the work keeps them out of the air.