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Onion Sandwiches
Eat this once properly prepared and never again turn up your nose at the name of onion.
Soak for an hour finely cut Bermuda onions in ice water which is thoroughly sweetened with sugar and well salted; drain and mix with slightly sweetened mayonnaise. Serve in round slices without crust.
A tea-table sandwich with almost no measurements, which is normal for the genre. The whole thing turns on the soak: mild onion, sweet-salt ice water, and thin bread.
- Bermuda onionsA flattened, mild, sweet white or yellow onion once shipped from Bermuda and later grown in Texas. Any modern sweet onion — Vidalia, Walla Walla, Maui, or a Spanish onion — does the same job. A standard yellow cooking onion is too harsh for a raw sandwich.
- The soak is the pointAn hour in heavily salted, sweetened ice water draws out the sulphurous bite and firms the slices. Skip it and the sandwich is exactly the thing the headnote is arguing against. Use roughly a tablespoon each of salt and sugar per quart of ice water; the onion is drained, so little of it stays behind.
- "Finely cut"Paper-thin rings or half-rings, not dice. A mandoline or the slicing side of a box grater gives the thickness this wants — thick enough to bite, thin enough to disappear into the bread.
- Slightly sweetened mayonnaiseA pinch of sugar stirred into the mayonnaise, no more. A book of this date would have meant a homemade mayonnaise; if using commercial mayonnaise, consider cutting the added sugar or leaving it out, as many brands already contain some.
- Raw egg, if you make the mayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise is uncooked. For anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- "Round slices without crust"The bread is cut into rounds with a biscuit or cookie cutter after the sandwich is assembled, or the slices are stamped out first and then filled. A close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin and buttered to the edges, keeps the moisture from soaking through.
- Timing and yieldAssemble no more than an hour ahead and keep the sandwiches covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; the drained onion still weeps. A large sweet onion and eight to ten slices of bread will make roughly ten to a dozen small rounds, depending on the size of the cutter.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour — a promotional book, but one the publisher said was compiled from recipes contributed by users of the flour. Chapters of "dainty" crustless sandwiches were common in cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, when the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon called for small sandwiches cut into rounds, fingers or hearts. The defensive opening line here is telling: onion was a kitchen vegetable, not a parlour one, and serving it raw to guests needed an argument. Bermuda onions carried that argument, the name having become a byword in North America for a mild sweet onion as the Bermuda trade grew in the later nineteenth century; by the time this book appeared, much of the crop sold under the name was in fact grown in Texas.