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Onions
Peel, cover with boiling salted water. Change water every ten minutes until tender. Drain, and add milk to cover. Reheat, season with butter, salt and pepper; or serve with white sauce; or scallop with white sauce and crumbs; or stuff. When boiled, remove hearts, and fill the space with finely chopped peppers. Surround with white sauce. Bake, and baste with butter.
Salsify, or Oyster Plant Scrape, wash, and cook until tender. Drain, mash, season, and sauté in butter; or cut in inch lengths, dip in fritter batter, and fry in deep fat.
Two entries have run together in the original typesetting: the onion methods, then a short paragraph on salsify beginning with the word "Scrape." Both are plain boiled-vegetable treatments of a kind that reward attention to timing more than technique.
- The water changesDraining and refilling with fresh boiling salted water every ten minutes carries off sulfur compounds and leaves the onions sweet and pale, though the book gives no reason for the instruction. It works, at the cost of flavor and of some water-soluble vitamins. One change partway through gets much of the effect; skipping it entirely gives a stronger, more onion-tasting result.
- How long is tenderNo time is given. Peeled medium yellow onions left whole need roughly 30 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer, testing with a skewer at the center. Keep the boil gentle or the outer layers slide apart before the hearts give way.
- Root end intactTrim the root flat but do not cut it away, and leave the onions whole. That is what holds the layers together through repeated draining and refilling, and what makes it possible to remove the heart later without collapse.
- The milk finishMilk to cover and a gentle reheat is a thickening-free version of creamed onions. Do not let it boil hard; salted milk over drained onions will catch on the pan bottom quickly.
- Scalloped and baked versionsFor the scalloped onions with white sauce and crumbs, and for the stuffed onions basted with butter, 375F for 20 to 30 minutes will bring the crumbs to color and the sauce to a bubble at the edges. The onions are already cooked through; the oven is largely for browning.
- "Peppers" in the stuffed versionIn a 1907 American book this most likely means sweet green bell peppers rather than chiles. Chop them fine and consider a brief sauté first, since raw pepper packed into a hot onion shell will not soften much in the oven.
- Salsify discolorsScraped salsify browns within minutes of hitting air. Drop the pieces into water with a splash of vinegar or lemon juice as you work, and cook in the same acidulated water to keep the flesh ivory rather than gray.
- Frying the salsify frittersDeep fat for the batter-dipped inch lengths means 365 to 375F. The salsify must already be cooked tender before it is dipped; the batter only needs two to three minutes to set and color.
- YieldFigure two medium onions per person as a side dish, or one large onion each for the stuffed version. A pound of salsify serves three.
Lowney's, published by a Boston chocolate company, belongs to the New England domestic-science tradition, and this entry shows its house style: one vegetable, one boiling method, then a fan of finishes running from butter to white sauce to scalloped to stuffed. The repeated water changes are pure Fannie Farmer-era thinking, in which a boiled onion was supposed to be mild and unassertive rather than tasting of itself. The salsify note attached to the end is a reminder of how common the root once was in American gardens; its nickname oyster plant comes from a faint shellfish quality in the cooked flesh, a resemblance generally described as more suggestive than convincing, and it was often used to stretch or stand in for oysters in soups and fritters. Salsify has largely fallen out of American markets since, surviving mainly in seed catalogues and at farmers' markets in autumn.