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Minced Meat in Onion Cups
From any cold cooked meat trim away tough fat and gristle then chop fine. Season highly with salt and pepper. Take one-half as many Spanish onions as there are people to be served or I large ordinary onion for each person. Halve the first, cut tops from the second. With knife or spoon scoop out the centers of each then steam until tender. In the meantime mince a portion of the loose onion, add to the minced meat, moisten with a good gravy or sauce and simmer gently for a few minutes. Arrange the onion cups on a hot platter, fill with the prepared meat, pour more gravy round them and serve. Cooked peas or other vegetables may be substituted for the meat.
A leftovers dish built on a sound principle: the onion is both container and seasoning. The only real technique is getting the shells tender without letting them collapse.
- Steam the shells, don't boil themBoiling waterlogs the onion and the walls slump when filled. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes over simmering water, depending on size, until a knife slips into the wall with slight resistance.
- Spanish onionsStill sold under that name, and still the right choice: large, mild and sweet, and generally much bigger than a standard yellow onion. Halved, one gives two cups; an ordinary onion with its top cut off gives one, which is why the recipe asks for one of those per person.
- Hollowing outLeave two or three outer layers as the wall. A melon baller or grapefruit spoon works better than a knife. Trim a sliver from the base of each cup so it sits flat, but do not cut through.
- "Season highly"Meant literally. Cold cooked meat is bland and the onion is sweet, so the filling needs more salt and pepper than seems reasonable when tasted alone. Mustard, Worcestershire or a little vinegar in the gravy earns its place here.
- Reheat the meat properlyCold cooked meat cut fine should be brought fully hot in the gravy, not merely warmed through. A few minutes at a gentle simmer, covered, keeps it from drying while it heats.
- "A good gravy or sauce"Roughly a half cup of gravy for four servings in the filling, plus more for the platter. Without it the mince is dry and dusty. Pan gravy, a thin béchamel, or stock thickened with a spoonful of roux all serve.
- Chop, don't process"Chop fine" means knife-fine, about 1/8 inch. A food processor turns cold roast into paste, which reads as pet food once it is sitting in gravy.
- Yield and finishingAs written, one filled cup per person as a light main course with potatoes or bread. A few minutes under the broiler with breadcrumbs and butter on top browns them and firms the presentation, though the original serves them plain.
This belongs to the long tradition of cookery-book pages devoted to the second appearance of a joint of meat. Stuffed onions of this kind appear across English and American household manuals from the nineteenth century onward, often in chapters on rechauffés or "made dishes" — the polite term for leftovers reworked so they would not look like leftovers on the table. The vessel-as-vegetable idea is older still. The closing line, offering peas or other vegetables in place of the meat, points the same way: on a week when there was no cold roast, the same dish could be put up from the garden.