Home › The Principles of Cookery › ONIONS, WITH GRATED CHEESE (a German recipe)
ONIONS, WITH GRATED CHEESE (a German recipe)
Wash and peel three or four large sound onions, cut them into slices fully half an inch thick, and place them side by side in a single layer in a well-buttered baking-dish. Sprinkle a little pepper and salt over them, place them in a quick oven, and let them remain until tender; strew each piece of onion thickly with grated cheese, and return the dish again to the oven for a few minutes until the cheese has dissolved. Lift the slices carefully upon a hot dish, and serve immediately. A little mustard should be eaten with them. Time, half an hour to bake. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A gratin of onion rounds that depends almost entirely on getting the onions genuinely tender before the cheese goes on. Everything else is seasoning.
- Oven temperatureA "quick oven" is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. That is right for the browning, but at that heat thick onion slices will colour at the edges long before the centres soften, so cover the dish with foil for the first two-thirds of the baking and uncover for the last stretch.
- TimingHalf an hour is optimistic for half-inch slices of large onion. Expect 40 to 50 minutes covered before they yield to a knife tip, then 5 to 8 minutes uncovered with the cheese on. Undercooked onion is the one failure this dish cannot recover from.
- Keeping the slices wholeCut the onions across the equator rather than pole to pole so the rings hold together, and do not crowd them. Lifting them intact onto the serving dish is easier with a wide fish slice than a spoon.
- The cheeseAs a German recipe this suggests Emmental or a young Gruyere-type cheese; both melt smoothly and are not aggressively salty. A dry aged Cheddar will work but tends to separate into oil and curd at 450F.
- Butter the dish generously"Well-buttered" is not decorative here. Onions release liquid, which then reduces and sticks; without a real film of butter the sugars in the onion will weld the slices to the dish.
- YieldThree or four onions for five or six people is a Victorian side-dish portion of a slice or two each. As a supper dish in its own right, allow one large onion per person.
- The mustardNot optional garnish but the balancing element against sweet onion and fat cheese. A sharp German or English table mustard, served alongside rather than spread on.
- CostSevenpence was the whole-dish cost in pre-decimal currency, and reflects onions and cheese being among the cheapest things in the larder.
Cassell's tagged a good number of its vegetable entries "a German recipe" or "a French recipe" — partly as a genuine nod to source, partly because continental cookery carried authority with English readers who were being told, repeatedly, that they boiled their vegetables to death. Baked onion with cheese belongs to the broad family of cheese-crusted vegetable dishes that English cooks generally called a gratin and German cooks überbacken, and it appears in a book of this kind because onions were cheap, kept all winter, and needed dignifying. The instruction to eat mustard with it is the most English thing on the page: mustard was often said to be the household condiment of choice for anything rich and cheesy, and its presence here suggests the dish was expected at a supper or high tea rather than as a formal dinner vegetable.