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Onions Au Gratin
Cook one quart of uniform-sized, silver-skinned onions in boiling salted water. When quite tender, drain and turn into a baking dish; cover with Cream Sauce (see Page 151), sprinkle the top with fine buttered cracker crumbs and finish cooking. Brown crumbs delicately.
A plain cream gratin whose success depends almost entirely on two things: onions cooked through but still whole, and enough drainage that the sauce does not thin out in the dish.
- Drain hardBoiled onions hold a surprising amount of water between their layers. Let them sit in the colander several minutes and shake them, or the cream sauce will loosen into a soup under the crumbs.
- Silver-skinned onionsThese are small white boiling onions, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 inches across; pearl onions are the closest common substitute. A quart works out to somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb.
- PeelingDrop them in boiling water for a minute, then cool and trim the root end; the skins slip off. Cut a shallow cross in the root so they do not shed layers while simmering.
- "Quite tender"Small onions take 15 to 20 minutes at a bare boil. Test with a skewer at the center rather than going by the clock, and stop while they still hold their shape.
- Cream SauceThe reference is to a basic white sauce: about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and often a little nutmeg. Roughly 1 1/2 cups covers a quart of onions.
- Buttered cracker crumbsSoda or common crackers crushed fine and tossed with melted butter, about 2 tablespoons butter to 3/4 cup crumbs. Panko behaves similarly but browns faster.
- "Finish cooking"The recipe gives no oven temperature. A moderate oven, around 375F for 15 to 20 minutes, will bring the sauce to a bubble at the edges and the crumbs to pale gold. If the top lags behind, a minute or two under the broiler finishes it; watch it, since buttered crumbs go from delicate to burnt quickly.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. It can be assembled several hours ahead and refrigerated, in which case add about 10 minutes to the baking.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to the early twentieth-century genre of menu books that handed the American housewife an entire meal, week by week, with cross-references to a stock of basic preparations kept elsewhere in the volume -- hence the bare instruction to see page 151 for the cream sauce. Au gratin in this period generally meant a dish finished with a browned crust, and in the United States that crust was often cracker crumbs rather than breadcrumbs or grated cheese, crackers being a cheap pantry staple. Small silver-skinned onions kept well in a cool cellar, and creaming them was one common way to make a stored bulb worth putting on a Sunday table.