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Baked Onions
The large Spanish or Bermuda onions are best for this purpose, Wash the outside clean, put into a sauce-pan with slightly salted water, and boil an hour, replenishing the water with more (boiling hot) as it boils away. Then turn off water; take out onions and lay upon a cloth that all moisture may be absorbed; roll each in a piece of buttered tissue-paper, twisting it at the top to keep it closed, and bake in a slow oven nearly an hour, or until tender all through. Peel, put in a deep dish, and brown slightly, basting freely with butter; this will take fifteen minutes more. Season with pepper and salt, and pour melted butter over the top.
A three-stage onion: boiled, then baked in a paper wrapper, then browned in butter. The method is sound but the timings assume a coal range with unreliable heat.
- The tissue paperNineteenth-century tissue paper was plain unsized paper used for wrapping food. Modern craft tissue is dyed and often treated, and is not food-safe; use buttered parchment, twisted at the top the same way, or a foil pouch.
- Slow ovenThe recipe gives no figure; a slow oven of this period is usually read as somewhere around 250-325F. The wrapper keeps the onion moist and steams as much as it bakes, so the low heat is deliberate.
- The browning stageThe recipe gives no temperature here, but a slow oven will not colour the onions; a hot oven, or a spell under the broiler with close watching, does the job in the fifteen minutes indicated.
- Cut the boilingA full hour of boiling plus an hour of baking may well leave a modern onion collapsing. Twenty to thirty minutes in salted water is usually enough to soften them before wrapping; test with a skewer rather than watching the clock.
- Onion choiceSpanish and Bermuda onions are both sweet, thin-skinned types. Any large sweet onion works, roughly 10-12 oz each; standard yellow storage onions are sharper and will need the full baking time to mellow.
- Drying mattersThe cloth-drying step is not fussiness. A wet onion steams inside its wrapper and will not brown afterwards without a long spell in a hot dish.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. One onion per person is a reasonable allowance. They are rich with the butter basting and want something plain alongside.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) came out of a compiling tradition in which recipes were gathered from many contributing households. Bermuda onions, imported through the Atlantic trade and later grown in Texas, and the sweet Spanish types were prized because they could be eaten whole without harshness. The paper wrapper is an older technique, cooking en papillote in kitchen French, adapted here to the uneven heat of a wood or coal range: the paper protected the outer layers from scorching while the onion cooked through, a job now done by foil or a lidded dish.