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Boiled Onions
Pour boiling water over the onions and remove the skins. Cook them for five minutes in boiling salted water, then change the water and change again in ten minutes, to remove the strong taste. Boil until tender, about one-half hour, then drain off the water, season with salt, butter and pepper and add one cup or more of cream sauce. Cook for ten minutes and serve in a deep covered vegetable dish. -Annabel Lee.
A straightforward creamed onion dish, but the total cooking time here is long by modern standards and the triple water change is doing something specific.
- Which onionsThe recipe gives no size or quantity; the whole-peeling and the covered vegetable dish suggest small boiling onions rather than large ones. Pearl onions can be substituted and will cook faster.
- The scalding trickPouring boiling water over the onions and letting them stand a minute loosens the skins so they slip off with a trim of the root end. Trim as little of the root as possible or the layers fall apart in the pot.
- The water changesDraining twice pulls out sulfur compounds, so the finished onions are mild and sweet. It also pulls out sweetness and body, and it is optional if your onions are already mild. Cook once in salted water if you would rather keep the flavor.
- Total timeRead sequentially, the five minutes, the ten, the 'about one-half hour' and the ten in the sauce approach an hour, though the half hour may be intended as the total boiling time. Small boiling onions are generally tender in 20 to 25 minutes of simmering. Test with a skewer and stop when it slides in with slight resistance, or they will collapse into the sauce.
- Cream sauceIn this period that means a white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or cream, cooked until it coats a spoon. Onions release water as they finish, so make the sauce a little thicker than you want it to end up.
- FinishingThe final ten minutes should be a bare simmer, not a boil, or the sauce will thin and may separate. The recipe seasons before the sauce goes in; season lightly, since the cooking water was already salted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; scale to the number of onions you peel. A grating of nutmeg or buttered crumbs browned on top are period-appropriate additions.
Creamed onions are one of the fixed points of the American late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century table, appearing beside roast turkey and boiled beef in many general cookbooks of the era, and they survive today mainly as a Thanksgiving side. The repeated changes of water reflect what seems to have been a genuine preoccupation of the period: onions were suspected of coarseness and of lingering on the breath, and cookbooks of the 1880s through 1910s often instructed cooks to boil them in two or three waters to make them fit for company.