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To Cook Onions
Boil till tender, in milk and water. Pour melted butter over them, and serve; or chop up and stew with a little milk, butter, and salt.
A nineteenth-century side dish reduced to two lines. The milk in the cooking water is the whole point, and the recipe never explains it.
- Why milk and waterBoiling onions in milk and water tames their sulphurous bite and helps keep them pale rather than grey. The recipe gives no proportions; roughly equal parts is a reasonable reading. Use enough to cover, and expect the milk to catch on the bottom of the pan, so keep the heat at a bare simmer and stir once or twice.
- Which onionsThe recipe does not say, but small white or yellow boiling onions, peeled and left whole (roughly 1 to 1.5 inches across), suit it best. Large cooking onions can be quartered, though the pieces may fall apart before the centres soften.
- TimingSmall whole onions need 20 to 30 minutes to reach the point of a knife sliding in with no resistance. Undercooked boiled onions are unpleasantly sharp; this is one case where the older instruction to cook until thoroughly tender is right.
- PeelingTrim the root end flat but do not cut it away, or the layers will separate in the pot. A minute in boiling water loosens the skins of small onions considerably.
- "Melted butter"In books of this period melted butter usually means a simple butter sauce, butter worked with a little flour and thinned with water or the cooking liquid, not just butter liquefied in a pan. Either reading works here; the sauce version clings better.
- The second methodFor the stewed version, drain the boiled onions, chop them coarsely, and return them to the pan with a few tablespoons of milk, a knob of butter and salt for five minutes or so until the liquid thickens slightly. A grating of nutmeg or white pepper is period-appropriate and improves it.
- YieldAbout 1.5 lb of small onions serves four as a side dish. Drain well; watery onions dilute the butter.
Boiled onions in butter or a milk sauce were a fixture of American and British tables through the nineteenth century, valued because onions kept in a cellar from autumn harvest into spring and so filled the long gap when fresh vegetables were scarce. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by ladies of Virginia "and her sister states," is full of entries this brief: one might infer that the writers assumed a cook who already knew how to handle a vegetable and needed only the household's preferred treatment of it. The milk bath is the interesting survival here, a technique also applied to salsify, parsnips and cauliflower in books of the era, and one that persisted into the creamed onions still served at American Thanksgiving dinners.