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Stuffed Baked Onions
Peel large Spanish onions, partly boil them, and leave them on a sieve to drain until nearly cold. Then cut the onions an inch and a half across the top, and scoop out the centre. Have ready a stuffing made with 1 ounce of finely grated Parmesan or Cheshire cheese, the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs minced very finely, 1 ounce of butter, 3 ounces of bread crumbs, 1 saltspoonful of salt, and half that quantity of pepper. Mix all well together with a spoonful or two of milk. Fill up the onions with the force-meat, brush them over with egg and bread crumbs, and bake them until nicely browned. Serve on a hot dish, with brown gravy poured over them. Time, half an hour to boil the onions; three-quarters of an hour to bake.
A straightforward Victorian stuffed vegetable that needs only a few conversions and one temperature the original never gives.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated. Bake at 375F, which browns the crumb coating over the three-quarters of an hour given without drying the onion out. Cover loosely with foil if the tops colour before the onions are tender.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the stuffing takes 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper. That is modest for 3 ounces of crumbs plus cheese; taste and adjust before filling.
- Par-boilingHalf an hour suits very large Spanish onions; smaller ones will need appreciably less. They should yield to a skewer at the outside but still hold their shape, since they finish cooking in the oven.
- Draining mattersLeaving them on a sieve until nearly cold is the hinge of the recipe. A wet, warm onion collapses when you scoop it and waters down the stuffing; cold ones cut cleanly.
- Cheshire cheeseA crumbly, salty English cow's-milk cheese. Any dry, sharp hard cheese stands in — aged Cheddar or a firm Lancashire — and Parmesan is the recipe's own first choice.
- Egg and crumbsBrushing with beaten whole egg and rolling in dry crumbs gives the browned crust. Use dried or panko crumbs for the coating and soft fresh crumbs inside, where they need to absorb the milk.
- The scooped centresChop the removed onion and work it into the stuffing rather than discarding it, or save it for the gravy. The recipe assumes a brown gravy already on hand; a stock-based gravy thickened with browned flour or a roux will answer.
- YieldOne onion per person as a side dish, two as a light supper. The stuffing quantity given will fill perhaps three or four large Spanish onions, depending on how deeply they are hollowed.
Stuffed baked onions belong to the long English tradition of turning a cheap vegetable into a dish substantial enough to stand on its own at table, and they appear in vegetable chapters throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Spanish onion, large and comparatively mild, was imported into Britain in growing quantities during the nineteenth century, and its size lends itself to this sort of hollowing and filling. The stuffing here — grated hard cheese, hard-boiled egg yolk, butter, breadcrumbs — is essentially a meatless forcemeat, and calling it force-meat, as the text does, follows the language of the stuffings used for poultry and joints.