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Plain Boiled Onions
Peel half a dozen medium-sized Spanish onions, and boil them gently for five or six minutes in a little salt and water. Drain them on a sieve, and throw them into cold water for an hour. Put them into a saucepan with plenty of cold water, and let them simmer gently until they are tender quite through, without being broken. Serve on a hot dish, with a little melted butter poured over them. Time, medium-sized Spanish onions, an hour and a half to boil.
A plain Victorian vegetable dish that depends entirely on the onions holding their shape. The double-cooking — a short blanch, a cold soak, then a long slow simmer — is there to soften the sulphurous bite without letting the layers slide apart.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the onions go into their final water, keep the pot at a bare shiver. A rolling boil pushes the layers apart and you end up with a pan of loose rings rather than whole onions.
- Spanish onionsStill sold under that name: large, pale, mild and sweet. A medium one is roughly 8–10 oz. Yellow storage onions work but are sharper and firmer, and will want the full time.
- The cold soakThe hour in cold water after blanching presumably serves to draw out some of the sulphurous sharpness; the recipe does not say why it is there. Skipping it will give a more assertive onion flavour than the mild result the method seems aimed at.
- An hour and a half is longWhole onions of this size are usually tender in 40-60 minutes at a simmer. Test with a thin skewer through the centre from 40 minutes on rather than relying on the stated time.
- "Melted butter"In a British book of this period melted butter often means a thin flour-and-butter sauce, not simply butter warmed in a pan. Either reading works here; plain warm butter with salt and pepper is the lighter choice.
- Salt the second water tooOnly the blanching water is salted in the original. Salt the long simmer as well, or the onions will taste washed out after ninety minutes in plain water.
- DrainingLift them out with a slotted spoon and let them sit a minute or two before saucing. Water trapped between the layers will thin the butter on the dish.
- YieldSix onions serve four to six as a side, alongside roast or boiled meat.
Boiled onions were a fixture of the nineteenth-century English table, treated as a vegetable in their own right rather than a seasoning and commonly served with roast or boiled meat. Spanish onions were valued for being large and comparatively mild, which suited them to being cooked and served whole. Onions were often thought of in this period as hard on the digestion, and a preliminary blanch may reflect that; whatever the reasoning, the practical effect is to mellow the flavour. The bare instruction followed by a separate 'Time' line is a common format in Victorian compiled household cookery books.