Home › Village Receipts › Scalloped Onions
Scalloped Onions
Boil six large onions until tender, drain, cut into small pieces and add to it a white sauce made of one tablespoon of butter, one tablespoon of flour and one pint of milk. Pour the mixture into a baking dish, cover with bread crumbs and bake twenty minutes.
— Mrs. J. H. Biglow
A plain community-cookbook scallop: boiled onions bound in white sauce and browned under crumbs. Two things need attention — the sauce is thin by modern standards and no oven temperature or seasoning is given.
- Oven temperatureThe receipt gives none, as was normal when ranges had no thermometer. Twenty minutes with an already-hot filling points to a moderately hot oven, 375–400F, long enough to brown the crumbs and heat through.
- The sauce ratioOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of milk is a very thin white sauce — roughly half the thickening of a standard thin white sauce (two tablespoons of each per pint). With wet onions added it will be soupy. Two tablespoons of each per pint gives a sauce that clings.
- Drain the onions hardThis is the hinge. Boiled onions hold a great deal of water and will thin the sauce further as they sit in the dish. Drain them in a colander and let them steam dry a few minutes before cutting.
- SeasoningNone is listed, which does not mean none was used; salt and pepper, and sometimes a grating of nutmeg, are reasonable additions to a white sauce of this kind, though the receipt says nothing. Season the sauce before it meets the onions.
- Onion size and boiling time"Six large onions" probably means ordinary storage onions of perhaps 3 inches across — call it 2 1/2 to 3 lb. Whole, they need 25–35 minutes to turn tender; quartered, about 15.
- CrumbsDry bread crumbs alone will scorch or stay pale and dusty. Toss them with a tablespoon of melted butter so they brown evenly.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish, in a shallow dish of about 1 1/2 quarts. A shallow dish gives more crumb surface, which is the point of a scallop.
Scalloped dishes — anything layered or bound with sauce and baked under crumbs — were the workhorse of American church and village cookbooks, applied to oysters, potatoes, tomatoes, cabbage and, here, onions. The name is usually traced to the shell in which such mixtures were once cooked and served, though the derivation is not settled, and by the nineteenth century it meant simply the method. Onions kept all winter in a cellar and cost almost nothing, so a receipt like this one turned a keeping vegetable into something worth putting on a table; the milk-and-flour sauce, cheap and filling, does the same work that cheese or cream would in a richer household. The attribution to Mrs. J. H. Biglow is typical of the form: these books were compiled from contributions by named local women, and the name beside the receipt was part of its authority.