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Scalloped Onions
Peel twelve good-sized onions and boil them one hour, drain and cut them into small pieces. Put a layer in the bottom of a baking-dish, sprinkle over them a layer of crumbs, then a sprinkling of cheese and a few bits of butter. Put in another layer of onions, crumbs, cheese, and so continue until the dish is full. Have the last layer crumbs. Put bits of butter over the top, add a half cup of cream, dust with salt and pepper and bake in a moderate oven one hour.
A straightforward gratin, but the two hour-long stretches in the original are both longer than they need to be.
- Moderate ovenSet 350F. The dish is already cooked through; the bake is only to melt the cheese, set the cream and brown the top.
- Boil the onions lessAn hour of boiling reduces onions to grey mush and leaches the flavour into the water. Fifteen to twenty minutes in salted water, until a knife slips through easily, is enough. Drain them very thoroughly or the finished dish will be watery.
- Bake timeForty to forty-five minutes gets you a browned top and bubbling edges. A full hour risks the crumbs going bitter and the cream breaking.
- Twelve onions"Good-sized" is not defined here; reckon on medium-to-large onions, somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 lb for twelve. That will fill a large baking dish and serve six to eight as a side.
- CreamHalf a cup of cream for that much onion is a thin coating, not a sauce. Use heavy cream; light cream or half-and-half is more likely to curdle at length in the oven.
- Crumbs and cheeseDry, coarse breadcrumbs hold up better than fine fresh ones, which turn to paste against wet onions. The book does not name the cheese; a firm grating cheese such as aged Cheddar is in keeping.
- Season each layerSalt and pepper dusted only over the top will never reach the bottom. Season as you build.
Scalloped dishes in nineteenth-century American cookbooks are defined by method rather than shell: alternating layers of a cooked main ingredient with buttered crumbs, moistened and baked, the word generally traced to *escalloped* seafood served in scallop shells and drifting from there to any layered, crumb-topped bake. Onions were among the cheapest and longest-keeping vegetables in the winter cellar, and cooks of this period faced the problem of making them palatable to households that regarded boiled onions as plain fare. Adding cheese, cream and butter is the American answer to the French gratin, arrived at without the French vocabulary.