Home › Vegetables › Onions a la Creme
Onions a la Creme
Peel four medium-sized Spanish onions, and boil them in water slightly salted until they are sufficiently cooked. Drain them on a sieve, and put them into a stewpan with 3 ounces of butter rubbed smoothly with a tablespoonful of flour, and a little salt and white pepper. Shake the pan constantly, and stir in by degrees 1/2 pint of cream or new milk. Serve the onions on toasted bread, with the sauce poured over. Sufficient for four or five persons. One hour to boil the onions, quarter of an hour to stew them.
A plain butter-and-cream sauce built around whole boiled onions, served on toast. The technique is a loose bechamel made in the pan with the onions already in it.
- Spanish onionsLarge sweet yellow onions, mild enough to eat whole. Four medium ones will be roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb total; a sharp cooking onion will not do the same job here.
- Half a pint of creamThe book is British in its measures, so this is 10 fluid ounces, about 1 1/4 US cups. Single cream or half-and-half is closer to the intent than heavy cream, which will thicken to a paste.
- New milkMeans fresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed. Whole milk is the modern equivalent.
- An hour of boilingProbably longer than needed, though whole onions of this size are slow: allow anywhere from about half an hour upwards and test with a skewer through the centre rather than watching the clock, or they collapse into the sauce.
- The hinge: the butter and flourThree ounces of butter rubbed with a single tablespoon of flour is very fat-heavy and will break if rushed. Keep the heat low, add the cream in small amounts, and shake or swirl rather than stirring hard so the onions stay whole.
- Draining mattersBoiled onions hold a great deal of water between their layers. Let them sit on the sieve several minutes, cut side down if you have trimmed them, or the sauce will thin out in the pan.
- The toastUse a firm white bread, toasted dry and hard. Soft modern sandwich bread disintegrates under a wet onion and a cream sauce within a minute.
- YieldAs written it serves four or five as a side or a light supper dish, four onions between them.
Anything a la creme in a nineteenth-century English or American cookbook means the vegetable is finished in a cream or milk sauce rather than merely buttered, and boiling carries off enough of an onion's sharpness to leave something sweeter. Spanish onions were an import valued for their mildness and were sold as a distinct article from the ordinary cooking onion. Serving vegetables on toast is common in household cookery of the period, the bread catching the sauce.