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Onions Stuffed with Nuts
2 large Spanish onions, or 6 good-sized Bermuda onions, 1 cup boiled rice, 1 cup chopped English walnut meats, mixed with 1 teaspoon salt, 1 saltspoon pepper, and 1 raw egg.
Put onions, without peeling into a saucepan of boiling water; add half the salt and boil for 1/2 an hour. Drain and dry. Remove outside skin, and with handle of a teaspoon, take out center, saving it for the sauce. Mix nuts, rice, seasoning and egg; fill this into onions; stand them in baking pan, brush with melted Crisco and bake in moderate oven for 1/2 hour. Chop very fine the portion that you have taken from center, press it through a sieve, add this pulp to a cup of tartare sauce and pour it into a sauceboat. Serve onions on platter; pass the sauce.
A meatless main from the Crisco era, straightforward except for a few measures and one ambiguity in the salt.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350-375F. The onions have had a long preliminary boil, so the bake is mainly to set the egg in the filling and colour the tops.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. So the filling carries 1 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper.
- The salt is contradictoryThe teaspoon of salt is listed as going into the filling, yet the method says to add half of it to the boiling water. Salt the water separately to taste and keep the full teaspoon for the filling, which is bland otherwise.
- CriscoThis book was issued by the makers of Crisco, hence the brand in the method. Any neutral solid or liquid fat brushes on the same way; melted butter gives better browning.
- Hollowing the onionsBoiling first is what makes this possible. Cut a thin slice off the top after boiling, then work the teaspoon handle down through the centre and lift out the inner layers as a cone, leaving two or three outer layers as the shell. Chilling the drained onions for twenty minutes makes them far less slippery to handle.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour suits large Spanish onions; smaller Bermudas may be tender sooner, so test them rather than following the clock. A skewer should meet no resistance, but stop short of collapse or the shells will not hold the filling.
- English walnutsSimply the common walnut, as distinguished from the black walnut then widely gathered in America. Toast them before chopping; the untoasted nut in a moist rice filling can taste raw.
- The sauceTartare sauce here means a mayonnaise base with capers, pickle and herbs, not a bottled fish sauce. As a mayonnaise it goes to the table cold against the hot onions. If you make the mayonnaise yourself, use pasteurized eggs, as it is never cooked.
- YieldSix Bermudas give six stuffed onions; two Spanish onions give two, though they can be halved to stretch further. A light main course with the sauce, or a side dish.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911 — which is why a shortening brand appears inside the instructions rather than in a list of fats. Stuffed onions themselves are much older and turn up across European cookery wherever a large sweet onion grows; the boiling-then-hollowing method is the standard one. What dates this version is the filling: rice and walnuts bound with egg reflects the early-twentieth-century interest in nut-and-grain protein as a substitute for meat, promoted both by vegetarian reformers and, more practically, by household writers looking for cheap centre-of-plate dishes. The Spanish and Bermuda onions specified were the mild, large market varieties of the day, Bermudas having been a substantial export crop to American ports before Texas growers took over the trade.