Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Stewed Onions
Stewed Onions
Peel onions and boil in boiling salted water till tender. When done, drain, and turn into hot vegetable dish. Melt 2 tablespoons of Crisco in saucepan, then stir in 1 tablespoon flour, mix well, add 1 cup milk and stir till boiling, add salt and pepper to taste and pour over onions.
A plain boiled onion with a white sauce poured over. The original assumes you know how much onion to buy and how long it takes; here are the numbers.
- Quantity and yieldFigure about 2 lb of small to medium yellow or white onions to serve four as a side. Very large onions can be halved or quartered so they cook evenly.
- Boiling timeWhole medium onions need 20-30 minutes in salted water to become tender through; test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the surface. Undercooked onion in a bland sauce is the usual failure here.
- Drain thoroughlyOnions hold a great deal of water between their layers. Let them sit in the colander a few minutes, or the sauce will thin and slide off in the serving dish.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, and the book is a Crisco promotion. Butter makes a better-tasting white sauce; use 2 tablespoons of it if you prefer, allowing for the fact that butter contains water and milk solids and so foams and browns as the roux cooks.
- The rouxOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a thin pouring sauce; modern white sauce usually uses equal weights or volumes of fat and flour. Cook the flour in the fat a full minute before the milk goes in, and add the milk gradually while whisking to avoid lumps.
- SeasoningThe recipe asks only for salt and pepper; nutmeg is a common addition to a milk sauce on vegetables. The dish is dull without generous seasoning, since neither boiled onion nor a plain milk sauce brings much of its own.
- ServingWarm the dish, as the recipe says. A milk sauce sets and skins quickly on cold china.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911 as an all-vegetable substitute for lard and butter; that is why an ordinary white sauce here begins with shortening rather than butter. The dish itself is much older than the book: onions boiled and sauced with milk appear in English and American cookery well back into the eighteenth century, when a plain white or "cream" sauce was a common dress for boiled vegetables.