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Forcemeat of Onion
An accompaniment for roast turkey or fowl. After peeling the onions, scoop out the inside carefully, and fill up the vacancy with forcemeat (see FORCEMEAT FOR TURKEY). Bake the onions in the oven.
A terse cross-referenced entry of the kind Cassell's used to save space: the method assumes you already have a bowl of turkey forcemeat and know how oven-baked onions behave. Two details do most of the work — pre-cooking the onion and covering it so the stuffing does not dry out.
- Parboil firstA raw onion shell will not soften in the time the stuffing needs. Simmer the peeled onions 10-15 minutes before hollowing them, or they emerge crunchy and sharp while the forcemeat is already browned.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature, only 'bake the onions in the oven'. A moderate modern oven, around 350F, for 40-50 minutes will do; cover loosely with foil for the first half so the exposed forcemeat does not crust before the onion gives way.
- Which onionsChoose large, squat, even-sized onions — Spanish or a good yellow keeper, about 8-10 oz each. Trim the root end flat but leave it intact so the shell holds its filling.
- Hollowing outTake out the centre with a teaspoon or a melon baller, leaving two or three layers as a wall. Chop the removed centres and work them into the forcemeat rather than discarding them.
- What the forcemeat isVictorian turkey forcemeat is typically breadcrumbs, chopped suet or bacon fat, parsley and thyme or sweet marjoram, lemon peel, salt, pepper and egg to bind; check the book's own FORCEMEAT FOR TURKEY entry, which this recipe sends you to. Softened butter substitutes for suet without harm; the egg is what keeps the filling from crumbling out.
- Keep the dish moistStand the onions in a buttered dish with a few spoonfuls of stock in the bottom and baste once or twice. Dry heat alone splits the shells and leaves the stock-free base scorched.
- YieldOne stuffed onion per person as a side dish. Half a pound of forcemeat fills roughly four large onions.
Stuffed onions belong to a long English tradition of using a hollowed vegetable as its own baking dish, and by the late nineteenth century the trick was applied to marrows, tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbage leaves alike. The word forcemeat is generally taken to be an alteration of farce, from French farcir, to stuff; in Victorian usage it covered both meat mixtures and plain domestic ones of breadcrumbs, suet, herbs and egg, the same sort of mixture that went inside the bird. The recipe itself opens by calling the dish an accompaniment for roast turkey or fowl, and a large Victorian roast was expected to arrive with several such dishes. The extreme brevity is a mark of the dictionary format, which cross-referenced relentlessly and expected the cook to have already read the forcemeat entry.