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Onions, Plain, Boiled
Peel half a dozen medium-sized Spanish onions, and boil them gently for five or six minutes in a little salt and water. Drain them on a sieve, and throw them into cold water for an hour. Put them into a saucepan with plenty of cold water, and let them simmer gently until they are tender quite through, without being broken. Serve on a hot dish, with a little melted butter poured over them. Time, medium-sized Spanish onions, an hour and a half to boil. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A straightforward two-stage boil: a short blanch, a cold soak, then a long gentle simmer. The whole point is onions that stay whole and turn silky rather than falling into shreds.
- Keep the water at a bare simmerRolling boil is what breaks the onions apart, and once the layers separate they will never come back together. Hold the pot just below a simmer, with the onions covered by plenty of water, and top up with hot water if the level drops.
- The cold soak is not optionalDo not skip the cold soak -- The five-to-six-minute blanch and the hour in cold water are there to take the edge off the onion's pungency, and the recipe clearly assumes a mild result. Omit them and the finished dish is likely to taste sharper.
- Trim the root end without cutting it offPeel and tidy the root plate but leave it intact, since it is the disc that holds the layers together through 90 minutes of cooking. Do not cross-cut or core.
- An hour and a half is right for the sizeAn hour and a half is a long simmer -- The recipe allows an hour and a half for medium-sized Spanish onions. A large onion does need long, gentle cooking to be tender right through without collapsing; test with a thin skewer at the middle, which should meet no resistance.
- Spanish onionsIn British usage this means the large, mild, straw-skinned sweet onion, not a Spanish variety in any strict sense. Any large sweet onion works: Vidalia, Walla Walla, or a supermarket "sweet onion" of similar size.
- "Melted butter" meant a sauceIn Victorian and Edwardian cookery books melted butter is usually a thin flour-and-butter sauce rather than plain drawn butter. Either reading works here; plain butter with salt and pepper is the lighter option, a spoonful of white sauce the more period-correct one.
- Drain them properlyBoiled onions hold a surprising amount of water between the layers. Lift them out with a slotted spoon, let them sit on a cloth or a sieve for a minute or two, then dish them, or the butter will slide straight off into a puddle.
- Yield and costSix onions for five or six people, as a vegetable side. The 1/2d. each is pre-decimal pricing and of no use except as an indication of how cheap the dish was.
Plain boiled onions belong to the older English vegetable repertoire, in which root and bulb vegetables were served whole under a simple butter or white sauce as an accompaniment to roast and boiled meats. The large mild onion sold in Britain as "Spanish" was a staple import by the late nineteenth century, cheap enough that the compilers could quote a penny-halfpenny apiece and treat a dish for six as a trivial expense. Boiled onions of this kind were a fixture of the winter table on both sides of the Atlantic, and survive most visibly in the creamed onions still served at American Thanksgiving.