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Stuffed Spanish Onions
Peel the onions under water and scoop out from the top a portion of the center. Parboil five minutes and turn upside down to drain. Make a stuffing of the chopped onion taken from the centers, softened bread crumbs, salt, pepper and a generous amount of butter. Fill the onions heaping full and sprinkle the top with buttered crumbs. Cover and cook till tender (about an hour) in a pan containing a small quantity of water. Let them brown a very little before taking from the oven.
A straightforward baked stuffed onion, but the original assumes you know both the oven temperature and how long a large onion really needs. Two adjustments make the difference.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual in cookbooks of the period; bake covered at 350F. The hour stated is realistic for onions of about 3 inches across, longer for anything larger.
- Parboil longer than five minutesFive minutes does little for a large Spanish onion. Giving hollowed onions 10 to 15 minutes in salted water helps ensure the outer layers are already yielding when they go into the oven, though the recipe's covered hour will usually take them to tender on its own.
- Spanish onionsThe term then and now means a large, pale, mild onion, not a specific Spanish variety. Any sweet globe onion works; a strongly pungent yellow cooking onion will dominate the butter-and-crumb filling.
- Peeling under waterThis is the period's remedy for stinging eyes; the irritant compounds are water-soluble and are largely carried away rather than reaching the air. Chilling the onions first also reduces the effect and is easier to manage.
- Scooping the centersTake out the core from the top with a melon baller or a small paring knife, leaving walls two to three layers thick. Cut too deep and the onion collapses in the pan once the sugars soften.
- Softened bread crumbsThese are fresh crumbs moistened with milk, stock or the parboiling water, not dry packaged crumbs. Chop the scooped-out onion fine and cook it in some of the butter first; raw onion in the stuffing will not soften in the same time as the shell.
- A generous amount of butterRead this as roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons per onion, split between the filling and the crumb topping. There is no other fat or binder in the dish, so it carries the whole thing.
- Covered, then uncoveredThe small quantity of water plus a lid steams the onions through; the final browning needs the cover off. Ten to fifteen minutes uncovered at the end, or a brief run under the broiler, gets the top crumbs colored without drying the filling.
- YieldOne stuffed onion per person as a side dish, two as a light supper course. Serve with the pan juices spooned over.
Stuffed onions were a standing item in American vegetable chapters from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, when a hollowed vegetable filled with buttered crumbs was one of the cheapest ways to make the vegetable course substantial. Large mild onions had been marketed in the United States as "Spanish onions" for many years by the time this book appeared, the name describing the type of bulb rather than its origin. The technique here belongs to the same family as stuffed peppers and stuffed tomatoes.