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Deviled Green Onions
Peel, trim and cut into inch lengths 2 bunches of green onions. Cook them in 1 pint of veal stock until tender. Make 1 cupful of white sauce, using equal quantities of stock and milk; when smooth and thick add to this 2 finely chopped gherkins, 1/3 of a teaspoonful of dry mustard and 2 well-beaten egg yolks and take from the fire. Have ready 3 or 4 slices of dry toast arranged in a shallow buttered dish, pour over it half of the sauce; add the drained onions, then the remainder of the sauce. Cover with a layer of buttered crumbs and brown in a quick oven.
A gratin of scallions on toast, bound with a mustard-and-egg-yolk sauce. Two things decide whether it works: the egg yolks must go in off the heat, and the onions must be drained hard or the toast collapses.
- Egg yolks off the fireThe instruction to "take from the fire" is the hinge. Stir the beaten yolks into the hot white sauce with the pan off the burner, and add a spoonful of the hot sauce to the yolks first if you want insurance. Yolks set at around 160F and will curdle into threads if the sauce is boiling.
- Veal stockHouseholds that bought veal bones would have had stock of this kind to hand. Use a light unsalted chicken stock instead; both are neutral and gelatinous, which is what the dish wants. Avoid a dark beef stock, which will overwhelm the onions.
- What "green onions" means hereScallions, or spring onions with a small white bulb. Two bunches is roughly 8-12 oz untrimmed, depending on how they are bunched. Cut into 1-inch lengths they need only 5-8 minutes in simmering stock to go tender.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F, depending on which period source you follow. You are only browning crumbs on an already-cooked dish, so 8-12 minutes on an upper rack is enough. A broiler does the same job faster if you watch it.
- The white sauceOne cupful means the finished sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and a half cup each stock and milk, cooked until it coats a spoon thickly. It needs to be thicker than a pouring sauce because the drained onions will still release liquid in the oven.
- Drain the onions properlyLift them out and let them sit in a sieve for a few minutes. Any stock carried over turns the bottom layer of toast to paste. Save the cooking liquid for the sauce.
- "Deviled"In this period the word means sharp seasoning: mustard, and often cayenne or vinegar, rather than chili heat as such. A third of a teaspoonful of dry mustard is restrained; a full half teaspoonful plus the gherkin brine reads better to a modern palate.
- YieldThree or four slices of toast makes a light supper for two, or a side for four. Bread that is genuinely dry rather than lightly toasted holds up far better under the sauce.
This is a thrift dish: a cheap vegetable stretched into a hot supper by toast, a flour-thickened sauce and a little stock. Recipe books of the early twentieth century often treated "deviled" as a technique rather than a dish name, meaning anything seasoned sharply with mustard, cayenne, vinegar or pickle, and the usage is generally traced to eighteenth-century English cookery, where devilling was a way of reviving cold meat and bones. Applying it to green onions on toast shows the same logic pointed at vegetables, in the era when the savoury on toast was a fixture of the household table. The veal stock is a period detail: veal was ordinary butcher's meat, and its bones gave a pale, gelatinous stock useful for this kind of light sauce.