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Boiled or Fried Onions
Wash and peel, boil ten minutes, pour off this water, again add boiling water, boil a few minutes and drain a second time; pour on boiling water, add salt and boil for one hour; place in a colander, turn a saucer over them, and press firmly to drive off all the water; place in a dish and add butter and pepper. Or, about half an hour before they are done, turn a pint of milk into the water in which they are boiling, and, when tender, season as above. Old onions require two hours to boil. To fry onions, slice and boil ten minutes each time in three waters, drain, fry in butter or beef drippings, stir often,, season, and serve hot.
The method is sound in outline but the timings belong to an era of large, sharp storage onions and a wood range. Modern onions are milder and will collapse long before an hour is up.
- The hinge: don't boil for an hourWhole medium onions are tender in 20-30 minutes in salted boiling water; large ones in 35-45. An hour, let alone the two hours suggested for "old onions," reduces today's onions to sweet mush with no structure left to press.
- Why three watersThe repeated draining is there to leach out sulphur compounds from strong-flavoured winter onions. With modern yellow or Spanish onions one change of water is plenty, and with sweet varieties you can skip it entirely — you are pouring off flavour along with the pungency.
- Pressing in the colanderBoiled onions hold a surprising amount of water, and it will thin the butter into a puddle. The saucer trick works, but press gently: enough to express liquid, not enough to burst the layers apart.
- The milk variationAdding a pint of milk to the boiling water in the last half hour gives a mild, slightly creamy onion. Scale it to the last 10-15 minutes of a modern cooking time, keep the heat at a bare simmer, and expect the milk to catch if the pan is thin.
- Frying: par-boil once, then dryThe book slices and boils ten minutes in each of three waters; one water is enough. Drain and blot dry before the fat goes in, as wet onions steam rather than brown. The recipe allows either butter or beef drippings; butter alone will darken before the onions soften, so use half butter and half a neutral fat if you want the taste without the scorch.
- SeasoningSalt goes in the cooking water; pepper and butter at the end, off the heat, as written. A little of the cooking milk stirred back in makes a rough sauce if you want one.
- YieldFigure one medium onion per person as a side dish, two if they are small. The original gives no quantity at all.
Boiled onions were a fixture of the nineteenth-century American winter table for the simple reason that onions kept. Stored in a cool cellar they lasted from autumn harvest into spring, alongside potatoes, turnips and cabbage, at a time when fresh green vegetables vanished for months. That helps explain the long times and the three changes of water: an onion held until February is a fiercely sulphurous thing, and repeated blanching was a common remedy. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, edited by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published in Ohio in 1877, was a revision of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, itself compiled by a group of Marysville churchwomen as a fundraiser. It is a book of exactly this practical, cellar-and-range housekeeping. The creamed variation here — milk added at the end of boiling — is of a piece with the creamed onions that still turn up at American Thanksgiving dinners.