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Onions, White, for Garnishing Stewed Chicken or Veal
Take a dozen freshly-gathered silver onions of a moderate size, cut a thin slice off each end, and blanch them in boiling water for a quarter of an hour. Drain them well, dry them in a cloth, take off the outer skins; put them into a stewpan with a salt-spoonful of salt, a salt-spoonful of sugar, and as much water as will cover them. Let them simmer gently until they are tender, without being at all broken. Drain them, and, a few minutes before they are served, put them into the stew which they are intended to garnish. Time, about three-quarters of an hour to simmer. Probable cost of onions, 3d. Sufficient for a dish of veal for three or four persons.
A simple glazed-onion garnish, and the whole point is that the onions stay whole. Everything in the method serves that.
- Silver onionsThese are small white onions, roughly 1 to 1.5 inches across — much the same thing sold as pearl or boiling onions, though "silver skin" varieties run smaller. A dozen of moderate size is perhaps 8-12 oz.
- Trim, don't gougeA thin slice off each end means exactly that. Cutting into the root plate lets the layers slide apart in the pan, which is the one failure the recipe is written to avoid.
- The blanch is for peelingThe blanch comes before peeling -- The onions are skinned after their quarter of an hour in boiling water, which loosens the skins, though that long in the pot also begins the cooking; the second simmer finishes it. Modern practice loosens the skins in 2-3 minutes of boiling followed by a cold-water dip, after which they slip off with the trimmed ends.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt spoon held about a quarter teaspoon. So roughly 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp sugar for the dozen.
- Simmer means barely movingThree-quarters of an hour seems generous for onions this size, and in practice 20 to 30 minutes at a bare tremble may be enough. A rolling boil will burst them. Test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Add at the endGoing into the stew only a few minutes before serving keeps them intact and keeps their sweetness distinct from the sauce. Cooked in the stew from the start they collapse into it.
- YieldA garnish for a veal or chicken stew serving three or four; three onions a plate.
Small whole onions cooked apart from the dish and added at the last minute are a fixture of nineteenth-century English and French cookery, where the visual finish of a stew mattered as much as its flavour — a blanquette or fricassée was expected to arrive pale and neat, ringed with white onions and often button mushrooms. The insistence on onions "freshly-gathered" reflects a period when small silverskins came in from the kitchen garden or market in season rather than year-round from a net bag, and the costing in pence was a habit throughout Cassell's.