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Stuffed Onions
Boil 8 large onions in boiling salted water till tender. Drain, and with sharp knife cut centers from each. Mix together in a basin 2 tablespoons chopped cooked ham, 3 tablespoons crumbs, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons cream, 1 beaten egg, salt, pepper, and paprika to taste, and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley. Fill with this mixture, sprinkle each with crumbs and dot with Crisco. Place on baking dish and bake in moderate oven 1 hour. Spanish onions are best to use.
A straightforward baked stuffed onion, written when Crisco was new and its maker was paying for the cookbook. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings assume onions that have already been boiled soft, and the oven hour is generous.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, still sold under the same name but reformulated over the years. Butter works better in both the filling and the topping; use 2 tablespoons in the mixture and about a teaspoon divided over the tops.
- Moderate ovenGenerally taken as 350 to 375F. The dish is already cooked through, so the oven is only setting the egg and browning the crumbs.
- The hour is too longThe hour is long -- Onions boiled until tender and stuffed with a wet, egg-bound filling generally need only 30 to 40 minutes at 350F, until the crumbs colour and the centre is firm. Onions boiled well past firm can slump if given a full hour.
- Boiling the onionsLarge Spanish onions take 20 to 30 minutes in salted water. Stop while they still hold their shape under a spoon; overshoot and there is nothing left to stuff. Cool them before coring or they tear.
- CoringCut a slice from the top and work a small knife or a melon baller down the centre, leaving two or three outer layers as a wall. The scooped-out centres are worth chopping and adding to the filling rather than discarding.
- CrumbsSoft fresh breadcrumbs, not dried packaged crumbs, which will drink the cream and go pasty. For the topping, dried crumbs are fine and brown more evenly.
- HamAny cooked ham does; two tablespoons is a small amount for eight onions, and doubling it improves the seasoning without unbalancing the egg.
- YieldEight onions serve four as a light supper dish with bread and salad, or eight as a side. They reheat acceptably but do not hold well overnight.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco, hydrogenated vegetable shortening, was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the recipe books issued under its name — Marion Harris Neil's among the best known — specify it in place of butter, lard or drippings in almost every dish, including ones like this where the fat is barely tasted. The dish itself is older than the shortening: stuffed onions, hollowed and filled with forcemeat or with breadcrumbs bound by egg, appear in English and French cookery well before, and the large mild Spanish onion recommended here was a familiar import by the later nineteenth century.