Home › Vegetables › Stuffed Onions
Stuffed Onions
Boil six large onions without peeling for one hour.
Drain, remove the skins, and with a sharp knife cut out the centre of each. Mix two tablespoonfuls of finely chopped cooked ham or tongue with a half cup of bread crumbs ; pour over this one tablespoonful of melted butter, one tablespoonful of cream, a half teaspoonful of salt, and a dash of pepper. Fill the onions with this mixture, place them in a baking-pan, baste them with melted butter, dust them with bread crumbs, and bake in a slow oven one hour. Serve with cream sauce poured over them.
This is one of the most delightful ways of cooking onions, and they may be served with poultry, roasted or braised, or as a garnish for hot beef à la mode.
A straightforward stuffed-vegetable recipe that assumes a coal range and an unhurried afternoon. Two hours of total cooking is more than large onions need.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is usually reckoned somewhere around 250-325F. At that sort of heat the hour of baking is mainly to set the stuffing and brown the crumb topping, since the onions have already had an hour's boiling.
- Cut the boiling shortAn hour of boiling leaves large onions nearly collapsing; the unpeeled skins presumably help them keep their shape, though the recipe does not say so. Twenty-five to thirty-five minutes for a large onion gives flesh that is tender but still firm enough to hollow out and stand up in the pan.
- Hollowing them outCut a cone from the stem end and lift out the inner layers, leaving two or three outer layers as a wall. The removed centres are worth chopping fine and folding into the stuffing rather than discarding.
- Ham or tongueCooked tongue appears often in cookbooks of this general period and is now largely a specialty-butcher purchase. Any well-flavoured cooked ham does the same job; the two tablespoonfuls are for seasoning, not bulk.
- The stuffing is dry as writtenHalf a cup of crumbs with one tablespoon each of butter and cream will barely hold together. Add cream until the mixture just clumps when pressed, or the filling bakes into a crust.
- Keep the pan from scorchingWith no liquid in the baking-pan the onion bottoms catch at the edges. A few tablespoons of stock or water in the pan, topped up if it goes dry, keeps them intact and gives you something to add to the sauce.
- Cream sauceThe book means a plain white sauce: about a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, then a cup of milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper.
- YieldSix onions serve six as a side dish, or three as a light supper course.
Stuffed onions belong to a family of nineteenth-century "made" vegetable dishes, in which a vegetable was hollowed, filled with a small amount of meat and crumbs, and returned to the oven — the same logic behind stuffed tomatoes, stuffed peppers and stuffed cucumbers, all standard in period vegetable chapters. The scale of the meat is telling: two tablespoonfuls of ham or tongue for six onions is a use for scraps from an earlier joint, not a shopping list. The serving suggestion points the same way. Beef à la mode is a larded, braised joint of beef cooked slowly with vegetables and wine, generally traced to French bourgeois cookery and long naturalised in English and American kitchens, and an onion that has already absorbed butter and cream was considered a proper garnish for it rather than a dish in its own right.