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Baked Onions
Choose large, perfect onions, trim the bottoms and remove one or two layers of the outside skin, but do not thoroughly peel them. Throw them in a kettle of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, boil rapidly for about one hour; then drain in a colander. If the onions are large they will not be soft in one hour, if small, cook, of course, a shorter time. Lift each one out separately, dry and roll in squares of tissue paper, twisting tightly at the top to keep it closed. Stand in a baking-pan and bake in a very slow oven one hour. When done, remove the paper, peel the onions, put them in a vegetable dish, pour melted butter over them, dust with salt and pepper and serve with roasted duck, turkey or chicken.
Spanish onions are particularly nice served in this way.
A two-stage method — boiled first, then baked dry — that concentrates the sugars in a large sweet onion without letting it collapse. The wrapping is the part that needs rethinking.
- Skip the tissue paperModern tissue is bleached, often dyed or scented, and not made for food contact or oven use. Wrap each onion in parchment twisted at the top, or in foil, which does the same job of trapping steam and shielding the skin from direct heat.
- "A very slow oven"Around 250-275F. The hour in the oven is meant to finish the centre gently and drive off water, not to brown anything.
- Leave the skin onTrimming the root and pulling off only the papery outer layers is deliberate. The remaining skin holds the onion together through an hour of rapid boiling; it peels away easily once baked.
- Boiling timeThe recipe gives about an hour of hard boiling but warns that large onions will not be soft in that time, and that small ones need less. Judge by feel rather than the clock: test with a skewer, which should meet slight resistance at the core, since an hour of baking follows.
- Drain and dry properlyWater clinging to the onion turns the wrapping to mush and steams rather than bakes. Drain in the colander until the steam stops, then pat each one dry before wrapping.
- Spanish onionsThe large, mild, straw-skinned onions sold today as Spanish or sweet onions are the right choice. Vidalia, Walla Walla or Cévennes behave the same way; a sharp storage onion will not sweeten as pleasantly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one large onion per person works as a side dish. Melted butter, salt and pepper is the whole dressing as written.
Boiled-then-baked onions belong to the late-nineteenth-century English and American roast dinner, where a whole mild onion was often served alongside duck or goose. Wrapping food in paper for the oven was ordinary practice in period kitchens — cooks used buttered paper to shield roasts and pastry long before parchment was sold in rolls — and here it keeps the onion from drying or scorching in a cooling oven, most likely the residual heat of a range that had already done the day's roasting. The recommendation of Spanish onions reflects a real change in the market: large sweet onions imported from Spain and the Canary Islands were widely available in British and American cities by the 1890s, and they are said to have been prized for being mild enough to eat whole.