Home › Vegetables › Boiled Onions (1 dozen onions 1 tablespoonful)
Boiled Onions (1 dozen onions 1 tablespoonful)
1 dozen onions, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1/2 pint of milk, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Salt and pepper to taste.
Remove the skins from the onions and throw them into cold water. If they are very strong, keep them under the water while you remove the skins. Put them into a large saucepan of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil until you can pierce them easily with a fork, about forty minutes. They must be cooked thoroughly but not soft. Then drain them and return to the kettle. Dust them with flour, add the butter, then the milk. Shake them until boiling hot, season and serve. Serve with roasted chicken or turkey.
A plain creamed onion, the standard American accompaniment to roast poultry. Nothing here is difficult, but the quantities assume a smaller onion than most supermarkets sell.
- Onion sizeThe ingredient list gives no size. If these are small white boiling onions, a dozen is a modest quantity; twelve large modern yellow onions would far outweigh the cup of milk. The forty-minute boil points to fairly large onions.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of flour and butter that gives a very thin coating sauce rather than a thick one, which is the intent: the onions should glisten, not sit in gravy.
- "The kettle"The same saucepan the onions boiled in, not a tea kettle. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks often use kettle loosely for a deep pot.
- Forty minutes is for whole large onionsForty minutes suits whole large onions; small boiling onions may be done in 15 to 25 minutes. Test early with a fork -- the instruction to cook thoroughly but not soft is the real guide, since collapsed onions will fall apart when shaken.
- Dusting with flourThe flour goes onto hot drained onions with no roux stage, so it must be scattered evenly and cooked out as the milk comes to a boil. Shake the pan rather than stirring with a spoon — stirring breaks the onions up.
- Peeling under waterSound advice that still works. Submerging the onion keeps the volatile sulphur compounds from reaching your eyes; chilling them first is often said to help as well.
- Trim, don't gougeCut the root end flush but leave it intact; it helps hold the layers together through boiling and a vigorous shake.
- YieldProbably serves six as a side dish. The recipe seasons at the very end, once the milk is boiling hot.
Creamed onions belong to the fixed repertoire of the American roast-poultry dinner, and the closing line — serve with roasted chicken or turkey — places this squarely in that tradition rather than presenting it as a dish in its own right. Small white boiling onions were a market staple in the late nineteenth century, used for this kind of dish along with pickling. The method is the simplest possible white sauce: flour dusted straight onto the hot vegetable, butter and milk added in the pan, no separate saucepan and no roux. Cookbooks of the period call this dredging, and it turns up over and over for vegetables and stewed meats. The dish survives largely because of Thanksgiving, where creamed onions still appear on tables that have otherwise dropped most of the vegetable cookery of this era.