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Spanish Onion Salad
Cook the onions in any way preferred. When cold divide them, simply pulling them apart in their natural divisions; then season with oil and vinegar, salt and pepper; or use any dressing preferred. The addition of a fresh tomato cut into strips, and a sprinkling of finely-chopped parsley, is a great improvement.
The instruction "cook the onions in any way preferred" is doing a great deal of work here; the choice of cooking method is what decides whether this is a sweet, silky salad or a watery one.
- Which onionA Spanish onion in this period means a large, mild, pale-skinned globe onion, the type sold today as Spanish or sweet yellow. Two large ones serve four as a side salad.
- How to cook themThe recipe leaves the method entirely open. Roasting or baking whole and unpeeled, at around 375F for about an hour until a skewer slides through easily, suits the dish; boiling works but leaves the layers waterlogged, which dilutes the dressing, while roasting concentrates the sugars.
- Cool before dividingThe recipe insists on cold onions for a reason. Hot layers tear and turn to mush when pulled apart, and warm onion drinks oil rather than being coated by it.
- Pulling apart in natural divisionsTrim off the root end and slip out each concentric layer whole, so you get curved cups rather than chopped pieces. This is the point of the dish, and a knife defeats it.
- Oil and vinegar proportionsSomething in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, is a workable ratio, though Victorian dressings varied widely and were often sharper or thickened with egg and mustard. Dress the onions once cold, as the recipe directs, and let them sit twenty minutes so the layers absorb it.
- The tomato"Cut into strips" means lengthwise wedges or ribbons, not dice. Seed them first if the tomatoes are very juicy, or the released liquid will thin the dressing.
- ServingBest at cool room temperature rather than fridge-cold, which mutes both the onion sweetness and the oil. It goes well with cold roast meat.
Large mild onions were imported into Britain from Spain in quantity through the nineteenth century, and the name stuck to the type regardless of where it was later grown; their sweetness made them palatable in ways a sharp English keeping onion would not have been. Cooked-onion salads dressed with oil and vinegar are a long-standing habit across the Mediterranean, and the suggested addition of raw tomato and parsley points in the same direction, at a period when English cooks were often still cautious about tomatoes uncooked.