Home › Vegetables › Creamed Onions
Creamed Onions
Select onions of medium and even size; the white variety is milder than the red. Peel, cover with boiling water, let stand for five minutes, then drain; this makes them less rank in flavor.
Place in a saucepan, add ½ teaspoonful of salt, barely cover with boiling water, and boil slowly until tender through and through; this will take fully an hour and a half unless they are small.
In another saucepan melt and mix together over the fire I large tablespoonful each of butter and flour; gradually stir in ¾ of a cupful of milk and a like quantity of the water in which the onions are cooking. When smoothly thickened, add salt and pepper to taste, transfer the cooked onions to the sauce and keep at the side of the fire for ten minutes.
A plain white sauce built partly on the onion cooking water, which is what keeps the dish from tasting flatly of milk. The only thing worth reconsidering is the cooking time.
- Cut the boiling timeAn hour and a half will reduce medium onions to a collapsing mush. Whole medium onions are generally tender in something closer to 30-45 minutes in simmering salted water, less for small ones; test with a skewer to the centre rather than by the clock.
- The blanching stepFive minutes standing in boiling water before the real cooking does soften the raw sulphurous edge, and it is worth doing. Drain thoroughly so the onions are not waterlogged going into the pan.
- MeasurementsThe sauce takes 1 large tablespoon each of butter and flour, and three-quarters of a cupful each of milk and onion water — roughly 6 fl oz of each.
- Cook the rouxMelt butter and flour together and let them bubble a minute or two before any liquid goes in, or the sauce carries a raw floury taste. Add the milk and onion water gradually, off the direct heat, whisking smooth between additions.
- Note"Boil slowly" and "the side of the fire" both mean a bare simmer. A hard boil breaks the onions apart and can catch the flour sauce on the bottom of the pan.
- The final ten minutesThis is to let the onions warm through and give up a little sweetness to the sauce, not to cook them further. Keep it below a simmer and stir gently so the onions stay whole.
- Onion varietyThe recipe's contrast of white against red follows period seed and market varieties, in which the white sorts were the milder ones sold for boiling; what a given cook meant by "red" is not certain. Modern white boiling onions or small yellow onions both work; peeled frozen pearl onions are the shortcut, though being much smaller they cook far faster.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of onions; the sauce comes to about 1 1/2 cupfuls, enough to coat roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of onions, or about four servings as a side dish.
Creamed onions belong to the great late-nineteenth-century family of vegetables finished in white sauce, a technique often said to have arrived in American household cookery as a domesticated version of French sauce béchamel, and then stayed for a century, applied indiscriminately to onions, peas, potatoes, celery and dried beef. Onions were among the cheapest and longest-keeping vegetables a household could buy in quantity, and a flour-thickened sauce turned a few cents' worth of them into something that could be sent to the table beside a roast. The instruction to save the onion cooking water for the sauce is characteristic of thrift cookery of the period. Note too the assumption that a cook has a "side of the fire" — a cooler zone on a coal or wood range where a pan could be held warm without further cooking, a convenience that gas and electric ranges replaced with a low burner setting.