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Baked Onions
6 medium-sized onions 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon butter Peel the onions, and cook in boiling salted water. Boil five minutes, drain, and again cover with boiling, salted water. Cook uncovered until tender, taking care not to boil so rapidly that the onions are broken. Drain, and place on a buttered pan, and brush with the melted butter. Bake in a hot oven until nicely browned.
A straightforward two-stage method: parboil to tame the sulphur, then roast to brown. The only real decision is how hot the oven runs.
- "Hot oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. The onions are already cooked through, so the bake is purely for colour and should take 15-25 minutes.
- Why the water is changedThe first five-minute boil is discarded to carry off the harshest sulphur compounds. It is not strictly necessary with mild modern storage onions, but it does produce a sweeter, gentler result.
- Keep them wholeTrim the root end but leave the base plate intact, and hold the second pot at a bare simmer. A rolling boil is what breaks the layers apart, which is the failure the original warns against.
- DonenessMedium onions take roughly 20-30 minutes at a simmer. A thin knife should pass to the centre with no resistance.
- One tablespoon of butterBarely enough for six onions. Two to three tablespoons gives proper coverage, and basting once partway through improves the browning considerably.
- SaltThe teaspoon is for the cooking water, not the onions themselves. Salt both changes of water generously; unsalted boiling water leaches flavour out of the onion.
- YieldSix onions serves three to four as a side dish, or two to three if it is standing in as the centre of the plate.
Meatless cookery of the early twentieth century was often driven less by vegetarian conviction than by economy, particularly around the First World War, when meat was expensive and households were urged to conserve it, and cookbooks of the period gathered chapters of "meat substitutes". An onion is not a protein substitute in any nutritional sense, but a large, browned, buttery onion occupies the centre of a plate the way a chop does, and that visual and structural role was much of what such chapters were after. Parboiling onions through two waters to soften their bite appears in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, and the finishing bake is the same logic that browns a roast, applied to a vegetable.