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Onions with Cream
Select silver-skin onions of a uniform size; peel and cover with boiling water, bring to boiling point, drain and repeat. Then cover with boiling water, season with salt and cook until onions are tender (from forty-five to sixty minutes). Drain and add one-half cup hot cream (to eight onions). Sprinkle with black pepper and serve.
A plain boiled-onion side dish from a 1913 American Sunday-dinner book. The only real technique here is the double blanching, which is there to soften the onion's sulphurous edge.
- Silver-skin onionsThese are small white boiling/pickling onions, generally an inch or so across though sizes vary. Frozen small whole onions work; pearl onions are smaller and will cook in a fraction of the stated time.
- The two blanchesCovering with boiling water, bringing back to the boil and draining, twice, leaches out some of the pungent compounds and is presumably meant to keep the finished dish mild. Skipping it is likely to give a sharper result.
- PeelingTrim the root end only and drop the onions into boiling water for a minute before peeling; the skins slip off and the layers stay intact so the onions hold their shape.
- Cooking timeForty-five to sixty minutes is long by current practice. Test with a skewer from twenty minutes on; small onions are usually tender in 20 to 30 minutes and may collapse if pushed to an hour.
- Half a cup of creamFor eight onions this is a coating, not a sauce, and it is added hot to already-drained onions. Heavy cream reduced for a minute or two in the empty pan clings better than cream poured straight from the carton.
- SeasoningSalt goes into the final cooking water, not the first two blanches, which are discarded. The black pepper is sprinkled over just before serving; a grating of nutmeg is a plausible period addition if you want one.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; eight onions and half a cup of cream would serve about four as a side dish. Scale the cream in proportion rather than by volume of pan.
Creamed onions belong to the same late-Victorian and Edwardian family of American vegetable dishes as creamed peas, creamed potatoes and creamed celery: a boiled vegetable finished with hot cream or a milk-thickened white sauce, meant to sit alongside a roast without competing with it. 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published as a year of complete menus, one for each Sunday, and dishes like this earn their place by being cheap, seasonal and able to hold on a warm stove while the meat is carved. Small white onions kept well in a cool cellar through the winter, which made them useful when little fresh green vegetable was to be had. The double blanching is older than the book and remains a common way to tame an onion that is to be served whole and barely sauced.