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Some Kitchen Kinks: Onions
Boiled Onions in White Sauce.
Peel the onions and cut off the roots, dropping into cold water as fast as they are peeled. Drain from the cold water and put in a stewpan with boiling water to cover generously. Add a teaspoonful of salt for each quart of water. Boil rapidly for ten minutes, with the cover partially off the saucepan. Drain off the water and cover the onion with . hot sweet milk (a quart of onions will require a pint of milk). Simmer for half an hour. Beat together one tablespoonful of butter and one level tablespoonful of flour. Add one teaspoonful of salt and one-fourth of a teaspoonful of white pepper.
Gradually beat in about half a cupful of the milk in which the onions are cooking. When smooth, stir the mixture into the onions and milk. Let the dish cook ten minutes longer and serve.
Stewed Onions.
Cut the onions in slices and boil in salted water for ten minutes. Drain well and return to the stewpan.
For a quart and a half of onion, measured before it was boiled, add two tablespoonfuls of butter, one teaspoonful of salt, and one-fourth of a teaspoonful of pepper. Cover the stewpan and cook over a hot fire for five minutes, shaking the pan to prevent the onion from browning. Set the stewpan back where the contents will cook slowly for forty minutes.
Drippings may be substituted for the butter, but, of course, the dish will not be so delicate in flavor.
Two straightforward onion dishes from the era of the coal range, where "a hot fire" and "back of the stove" did the work of a burner dial. The main adjustments are units, milk, and pan management.
- Measuring onions by volumeA quart of peeled small onions is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb; a quart and a half of sliced onion is somewhere around 1 1/2 to 2 lb. The recipe gives no yield, so judge quantities by the pan.
- Sweet milkThis means plain fresh milk, as opposed to soured or buttermilk. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will taste thin after simmering.
- The lid off for ten minutesThe lid partly off for ten minutes -- The recipe leaves the cover ajar rather than sealed, which is usually explained as letting steam and sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the pot. Whatever the mechanism, it is worth following as written.
- Watch the milkA pint of milk over half an hour will catch and scorch on a thin pan, and milk held at a simmer can separate. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, keep it at a bare simmer, and stir now and then.
- The butter-and-flour pasteThis is beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Working the flour into soft butter first, then loosening it with hot cooking milk, is what keeps it from lumping when it goes into the pot. Ten minutes of further cooking removes the raw-flour taste.
- "Set the stewpan back"On a range this meant the cooler edge of the stovetop. Translate it as the lowest setting on a burner, or a covered pan in a low oven, for the forty-minute finish.
- Stewed onions, in practiceThe five minutes over high heat with butter is a shake-not-stir step to coat the slices without colouring them. If they do brown you get a different and perfectly good dish, but not the pale one intended.
- Drippings instead of butterBeef or bacon fat works and was the thrifty choice. The note about delicacy is accurate: the onions come out savoury rather than sweet.
Boiled onions in white sauce was a familiar dish on American and British tables through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, and small white onions in cream sauce still turn up at Thanksgiving. "Kink" here means a clever twist or knack rather than a fault, and the fine points the recipe dwells on are the partly uncovered pot, the milk in place of water, and the butter-and-flour paste beaten smooth before it meets the pan. Dropping the peeled onions into cold water as you go was standard practice; onions left standing, particularly after a carbon-steel knife, discolour. The choice of white pepper over black is consistent with wanting an unblemished pale sauce.