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Creamed Onion
1 quart onions 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/3 cups water in which the onions are boiled 1/2 teaspoon salt Peel the onions under cold water, 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 reserve one and one-third cups of the water with which to make the dressing. Rub the butter and flour together, and stir into it the warm liquid. Add additional salt if desired. Turn this dressing over the onions, and reheat a few minutes.
A plain white sauce built on onion cooking water rather than milk, which is what makes it a "meat substitute" chapter dish rather than a dairy one. Two things carry it: the double boiling and the restrained simmer.
- A quart of onionsOnions here are measured by volume, peeled and whole. A quart of small boiling onions is on the order of a pound and a half. Pearl onions work; larger onions should be quartered, though they will break up more readily.
- Why the water is changedThe first five-minute boil is poured off, a standard period step for mellowing onions; discarding that water carries away some of the sharper sulfur compounds. The recipe itself gives no reason for it.
- Peeling under cold waterThis is for the cook's eyes, not the onions. A 30-second dip in boiling water followed by cold also loosens the skins of small onions and is faster.
- Keep it at a bare simmerThe instruction not to boil rapidly is the hinge. Small whole onions collapse into layers if they are knocked about; hold the pot at a lazy simmer and expect 15-25 minutes depending on size.
- Rubbing butter and flourTwo tablespoons each rubbed cold into a paste is a beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Whisk it into the hot onion liquid off the heat, then return to a low burner and cook two or three minutes so the raw flour taste goes; 1 1/3 cups liquid to that much flour gives a sauce just thick enough to coat.
- Season at the endThe reserved liquid is salted cooking water and its saltiness varies. Taste before adding the half teaspoon, as the recipe itself hints with "additional salt if desired." A little white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are traditional and not out of place.
- YieldServes four to six as a side, or three as the centre of a meatless plate.
Creamed onions belong to the long American tradition of boiled vegetables finished in a flour-thickened sauce, a technique associated with nineteenth-century domestic-science teaching, where a white sauce was taught as a fixed formula of fat, flour and liquid and then applied to whatever vegetable was at hand. What sets this version apart is that the liquid is the onion water itself rather than milk or cream, so the dish keeps its name while using less dairy. Meatless cookery books were numerous in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century, encouraged both by vegetarian and health-reform movements and, around the First World War, by campaigns urging households to observe meatless days; their "meat substitute" chapters generally leaned on eggs, cheese, legumes, nuts and substantial vegetable dishes to fill the place on the plate a joint would otherwise occupy.