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Onions, Stuffed and Baked
Peel two large Spanish onions, partly boil them, and leave them on a sieve to drain until nearly cold. Then cut the onions an inch and a half across the top, and scoop out the centre. Have ready a stuffing made with one ounce of finely-grated Parmesan or Cheshire cheese, the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs minced very finely, one ounce of butter, three ounces of bread-crumbs, one salt-spoonful of salt, and half that quantity of pepper. Mix all well together with a spoonful or two of milk. Fill up the onions with the forcemeat, brush them over with egg and bread-crumbs, and bake them until nicely browned. Serve on a hot dish, with brown gravy poured over them. Time, half an hour to boil the onions; three-quarters of an hour to bake. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for four persons.
A straightforward stuffed vegetable that needs only unit conversions and an oven temperature, neither of which the original supplies.
- Spanish onionsThese are the large, mild, pale-skinned globe onions, often 12 oz or more each; two of them feed four as a side. A strong yellow cooking onion will be harsher and less easy to hollow out neatly.
- Salt-spoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon, so this is 1/4 tsp salt and a scant 1/8 tsp pepper for the whole stuffing. Taste the mixture before filling; three ounces of crumbs will absorb more salt than that suggests.
- Ounces to volumeThree ounces of fresh breadcrumbs is roughly 1 1/2 cups loosely packed; one ounce of grated Parmesan is about 1/3 cup; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Three-quarters of an hour suits a moderate oven, 350-375F, which browns the crumb coating without scorching it before the onion layers soften.
- The parboilHalf an hour of boiling is for whole onions of real size; test with a skewer, which should meet firm resistance. Overshoot and the shells collapse when you scoop them. Draining and cooling on a sieve matters -- a hot, wet onion is harder to scoop and to coat cleanly.
- Egg and bread-crumbsThis is the standard Victorian shorthand for brushing with beaten whole egg and then dredging in dry crumbs, not the fresh crumbs used in the stuffing. Dry, fine crumbs give the browning the recipe is after.
- Cheshire cheeseA crumbly, salty English cow's-milk cheese; a dry Lancashire or a firm white Cheddar behaves much the same in the stuffing. Parmesan gives a sharper result and needs less of it.
- The scooped centresThe recipe says nothing about them. Chop and add a spoonful or two to the forcemeat, or keep them for the gravy.
- Cost and yieldTenpence in pre-decimal currency, and the book's own figure of four servings holds if these go alongside a roast rather than standing alone.
Stuffed onions belong to a long line of English "forcemeat" cookery, in which a hollowed vegetable becomes a vessel for a seasoned bread mixture -- the same logic that produced stuffed marrows, stuffed cucumbers and stuffed cabbage. Cassell's places it among dishes that stretch a small quantity of cheese, butter and egg yolk into something substantial enough to serve as a course; the probable cost is printed alongside the timing, as it is for every recipe in the book, which was aimed squarely at households counting pence. The choice of Spanish onions is deliberate and period-specific; large sweet onions imported from Spain were widely sold in British markets through the later nineteenth century and were prized for exactly this sort of treatment, being mild enough to eat in quantity. The hard-boiled egg yolks worked into the crumbs are a very old binding trick, generally traced back through eighteenth-century forcemeat practice, and they give a richer, shorter texture than raw egg would.