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Fried Onions
Remove the skins and cut the onions into slices, cover with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil twenty minutes. Drain. Put a large tablespoonful of butter in a frying-pan, when hot add the onions, fry thirty minutes, stirring frequently. Add the pepper and salt and serve with broiled or panned steak or fried calves' liver.
A two-stage method: the onions are parboiled first, then fried long and slow. The result is closer to a soft, sweet onion compote than to the crisp rings the name suggests today.
- The parboil is optionalTwenty minutes in salted water softens the onions and shortens the frying. Skip it if you want more onion flavour, but then expect the pan stage to run longer.
- Drain thoroughlyWet onions steam rather than brown. Tip them into a colander and let them sit a few minutes, or the butter will spit and the browning will stall.
- Thirty minutes means thirty minutesThe recipe gives the pan stage a full half hour. Kept gentle, the onions colour evenly; hurried over high heat they scorch at the edges before they soften and sweeten.
- Butter alone will darkenMilk solids in butter brown well before the onions are done. A tablespoon of neutral oil alongside the butter buys you the extra time without burnt flecks.
- QuantityThe recipe never says how many onions, nor how many it serves; judge by what your pan will hold in a single layer.
- Seasoning at the endThe recipe salts the boiling water, but that water is drained off, so the final seasoning of pepper and salt is doing the work. Taste as you go.
- Calves' liverStill sold, though you may have to ask a butcher. Ordinary beef or lamb's liver takes the same treatment; the onions are the point either way.
Onions fried slowly in fat and served over steak or liver were a fixture of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking, cheap enough for any household and useful for making a modest cut of meat taste like more. The parboiling step, rarer now than it once was, has been explained in various ways — as a concession to a period taste for milder, less pungent onions, or as a practical head start on a wood or coal range — though these are suggestions rather than anything the recipe itself sets down. Liver and onions was standard offal cookery when nothing from a carcass was wasted, and the pairing survives in British and American diner cooking to this day.