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Filled Spanish Onions
6 Spanish onions A bit of nutmeg 1 lb. ground pork 1 egg Salt to taste 1 slice bread soaked in water Hollow out the onions. Mix the meat with the other ingredients and fill the onions with this mixture. Place in a large kettle and cover with water. Boil about an hour and a half. Another boiled dinner may may be made in the same way by stuffing a cabbage head instead of the onions.
Mrs. Graeff.
A plain church-supper dish: a pork forcemeat packed into hollowed onions and simmered in water until both are done. The recipe assumes you know how many onions a pound of pork will fill, and it never says.
- Quantity and yieldA pound of ground pork with an egg and a bread panade fills roughly four to six large Spanish onions, depending on how deeply you hollow them. That serves four as a main course with potatoes.
- What a Spanish onion isA large, mild, pale-skinned onion; the big sweet globe onions sold today are the closest common equivalent. Choose ones that stand upright and are wide enough to hold a good spoonful once the centre is out.
- Hollowing themCut off the top, then work out the inner layers with a paring knife and a small spoon, leaving two or three outer layers as the shell. Chop the removed centres and work them into the meat rather than throwing them out.
- The soaked breadOne slice squeezed nearly dry is a panade; it keeps the pork from packing into a dense ball. Use a plain white loaf, not a coarse or seeded bread.
- Boil means simmerA hard boil for ninety minutes will burst the onions and shred the filling into the water. Bring the kettle up, then hold it at a bare shiver. The onions should be tender enough to yield to a skewer with no resistance.
- Doneness of the porkNinety minutes at a simmer takes the filling well past done. If you want to check, the centre of the stuffing should read 160F.
- Seasoning"Salt to taste" on a raw pork mixture means frying a teaspoon of it flat in a pan and tasting before you fill anything. Pork this plain takes salt generously; the recipe calls for no pepper, though a little is a reasonable addition, and the nutmeg should be a scrape rather than a pinch.
- The cooking liquidPlain water gives you a thin, sweet onion broth worth saving. Cooking in stock instead, or reducing the liquid afterward into a sauce, costs nothing and improves the plate.
- The cabbage variantHollowing a whole cabbage head is awkward; a common method is to blanch the head, open the leaves, pack the filling into the centre, and tie the whole thing in cheesecloth before it goes in the kettle.
Stuffed onions and stuffed cabbage both belong to the wide northern European family of dishes that stretch a small amount of meat with bread and an egg — the same logic as a meatloaf, applied to a vegetable that acts as its own dish. Community cookbooks like this one are full of such recipes: contributed by name, written for cooks who already knew the technique, and consequently short on the details a stranger would need. The phrase "another boiled dinner" is the giveaway that this belonged to a whole category of one-kettle meals, where the stove held a single large pot for hours and everything went into it. Mrs. Graeff's recipe gives no onion count and no pan size because nobody at her table needed to be told.