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Onions, Spanish, Baked
Wash and trim, without peeling, half a dozen Spanish onions of medium size. Put them into a saucepan, cover them with water slightly salted, and let them simmer very gently for about an hour. Take them up, drain them, wrap each onion in a separate piece of paper, put them into a moderate oven, and let them remain until quite tender. Before dishing them, remove the skins, sprinkle a little pepper and salt over them, and pour half a pint of good gravy into the dish with them. Time to bake, about an hour and a half. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A two-stage method — a gentle simmer in the skins, then a long slow bake — that produces onions sweet enough to eat with a spoon. The total time is closer to two and a half hours than the ninety minutes the note at the end suggests.
- The hinge: keep the skins onSimmering and baking the onions unpeeled is what stops them collapsing into a wet mass. The papery outer layers act as a jacket, and they slip off easily once the onion is cooked and slightly cooled.
- What a Spanish onion isA large, pale, mild variety, close to the big mild yellow onions sold loose today. The recipe specifies only 'medium size' and gives no weight.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F / 175-180C. The recipe allows about an hour and a half for the bake; a skewer should meet no resistance at the centre.
- The paper wrappingUse baking parchment or foil. Do not use printed paper of any kind.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard boil splits the skins and the outer layers start to shed. Keep the water barely trembling for the full hour.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups. A good beef or veal gravy is meant; any well-reduced roasting-pan gravy or a decent stock thickened lightly will serve. Add it hot, at the table, or the onions cool instantly.
- YieldThe recipe gives six onions as sufficient for five or six persons, served as a vegetable alongside roast meat.
Cassell's treats this as an everyday matter, which tells you how Victorian kitchens regarded the onion: a cheap thing — 8d for enough to feed six — that repaid slow cooking with something close to luxury. Spanish onions arrived in British markets in quantity through the nineteenth century, prized above home-grown sorts for their size and mildness, and whole baked onions served with gravy are often said to have accompanied roast beef and mutton. The trick of cooking a vegetable in its own skin and then in a paper wrapper is the same logic as the French en papillote: no fat, no browning, nothing lost, and the onion's own moisture doing the work.