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To Bake Onions
Boil six onions in water, or milk and water with a seasoning of pepper and salt. When done enough to mash, take them off, mash them with butter, grate bread crumbs over them and set them to bake. Or place them whole in the baking dish with butter and bread crumbs.
A plain nineteenth-century onion gratin, written with no quantities beyond the onions themselves. The instructions assume you know when an onion is soft and how much butter a dish will carry.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the dish only needs browning. 375-400F for 20-30 minutes browns the crumbs without drying the onions; the mashed version sets faster than the whole one.
- Which onionsSix medium yellow onions, about 2 lb, serve four as a side.
- Boiling in milk and waterThe milk option is not decorative: it mellows the sulphurous edge and leaves the onions paler. Use roughly half milk to half water, keep it at a bare simmer, and watch it, since milk scorches and boils over readily.
- "Done enough to mash"Twenty to thirty minutes for quartered onions, longer for whole ones, until a knife meets no resistance at the core. Under-boiled onions will not mash smoothly and stay harsh after baking.
- Drain hardThe recipe omits this and it is the hinge of the dish. Boiled onions hold a great deal of water; press them in a sieve before mashing or the butter and crumbs will float in grey liquid.
- Butter and crumbsAbout 3 tablespoons of butter to six onions, and a cup of fresh soft crumbs from a plain loaf. Period crumbs were grated from stale bread by hand, coarser than commercial dried crumbs, which brown much faster and can burn.
- The whole-onion versionPeeled boiled onions set upright in a buttered dish, dotted with butter and strewn with crumbs. A little of their cooking liquid or some cream in the dish will help keep them from drying out.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper go into the cooking water here, which seasons weakly. Taste and correct after mashing; a grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream is in keeping with the period.
Baked and creamed onions were standard winter vegetable cookery in Anglo-American households, and this entry shows why: onions kept in a cellar or loft from autumn through spring when little else green was available, so cooks needed several ways to serve them. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia housekeepers, and its terse style is characteristic of the genre - the reader was assumed to have cooked onions many times and needed only the idea, not the method. Boiling in milk before baking is a long-standing English treatment, generally explained as a way of drawing out the sharpness of a strong storage onion, and the buttered crumb topping is the same finish that period cooks put on macaroni, oysters and scalloped tomatoes.