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Baked Onions
Peel and cut white onions in thick slices.
Place in a saucepan, add 1 teaspoonful of salt, cover with boiling water and boil for ten minutes.
Arrange in layers in a baking dish with salt, pepper and bits of butter. Pour in stock to half fill the dish and bake slowly until tender. In a frying-pan stir 1 tablespoonful of butter and 2/3 of a cupful of coarse bread crumbs until slightly browned, then cool. Mix with an equal quantity of grated cheese, dust with pepper, spread over the onions and return to the oven until the cheese is melted.
A straightforward gratin of parboiled onions, braised in stock and finished with buttered crumbs and cheese. The only real vagueness is the oven, which the original never names.
- "Bake slowly"The original names no temperature. A low oven, somewhere around 325F, suits the instruction; expect roughly 45 minutes to an hour, uncovered, until a knife slides through with no resistance. The recipe returns the dish to the oven for the cheese stage, though a minute or two under the broiler will do the same job.
- The parboil is not optionalThe parboil -- ten minutes in salted boiling water softens the onions' sharpness and gives the slices a head start, so that they are tender by the time the stock has cooked down. The recipe treats it as a required step.
- Slice thickness"thick slices" is not defined; about half an inch is a reasonable reading. Thinner slices are more likely to break down during the braise, thicker ones to separate when served.
- White onionsThese are the mild round white onions, not peeled pearl onions and not the yellow storage onion. Sweet onions work; a plain yellow onion is fine but noticeably more assertive.
- Stock quantityThe original says only to half-fill whatever dish is used, so the amount depends entirely on the dish and how tightly the onions are packed. The onions release liquid as they cook, so err low rather than high.
- Cool the crumbs before mixingThe instruction to cool is deliberate. Hot butter-toasted crumbs stirred straight into grated cheese make a greasy paste rather than a topping that browns in separate flakes.
- The cheeseEqual quantity by volume to the crumbs, so about 2/3 cup grated. A firm dry cheese that melts without weeping is what is wanted here — aged Cheddar, Gruyère or a hard grating cheese.
- YieldThe original specifies no quantity of onions and no number of servings; scale to the baking dish. It reheats well, but the topping softens and wants crisping again.
Baked onions of this kind belong to the long tradition of vegetable gratins that gave a cheap, plentiful bulb a place at a dinner table where it might otherwise have been boiled and forgotten. Onions kept for months in a cellar without refrigeration, which is why they turn up so persistently in low-cost cookery of the period: they were available in February when almost nothing green was. The construction here — parboil, braise in stock, finish with buttered crumbs and cheese — is often said to be a domestic descendant of French gratin technique as it filtered into English and American household manuals through the nineteenth century, and the buttered crumb topping may well have served as an economical alternative to a proper pastry crust or a rich sauce, though this is inference rather than documented fact. Note that the stock does the work a cream sauce would do in a wealthier kitchen.