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Onions Baked with Grated Cheese
2 pounds of onions 2 ounces of butter 2 ounces of grated cheese Pepper and salt Peel and slice the onions; the slices should be about half an inch thick. Throw them into plenty of cold, salted water, and bring them quickly to the boiling point; skim them, and let them boil for twenty minutes. Drain them carefully, and put them into a buttered baking dish, add a little pepper and salt, and break the remainder of the butter in bits, and place it over the onions. Put them in a hot oven for a quarter of an hour. Now remove the dish from the oven, and sprinkle the grated cheese over the onions--do this very quickly--return to the oven until the cheese is melted and slightly browned, which should be in ten minutes or less. Serve immediately. The white onions are the most delicate and are therefore more suitable as a vegetable than the yellow or red variety.
A simple gratin that depends almost entirely on how dry the onions are when they go into the dish. Everything else is timing.
- Drain hard, then drain againTwenty minutes of boiling leaves the slices saturated. Let them sit in the colander several minutes and blot them, or the butter and cheese will float in onion water rather than glaze the top.
- "A hot oven"In period terms roughly 400-450F. The first fifteen minutes, before the cheese goes on, will drive off moisture and begin colouring the edges; the second stint is only long enough to melt and brown the cheese.
- Ounces are weightTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. Two ounces of grated cheese is roughly half a cup loosely packed, less than most modern gratin recipes use.
- The cheeseA firm, dry grating cheese is what this wants; a young, moist one will slump into strings instead of browning.
- Why the quick sprinklingThe recipe insists on speed but does not say why; the likely reason is keeping the dish hot enough that the cheese starts melting on contact, so ten minutes back in the oven browns it rather than drying the onions out.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes suits half-inch slices of a large onion and leaves them tender but still holding shape. Thinner slices will collapse; check at twelve to fifteen minutes and pull them while there is still a little resistance.
- Salted water from coldThe recipe starts the onions in plenty of cold salted water and brings them up quickly, skimming as they come to the boil.
- YieldTwo pounds of onions serves four as a side dish, or two if it is standing in as the centre of the meal.
Cheese did a great deal of work in meatless and economising cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and vegetables boiled then gratinated with butter and grated cheese - macaroni, cauliflower, onions - recur across such books. The closing note about white onions being more delicate than yellow or red reflects a period habit of treating the onion as a vegetable in its own right rather than only a flavouring, and mild baked or creamed onions were a familiar English and American side dish. The technique here - par-boil, dry in a hot oven, finish with cheese - is the plain domestic relative of the later gratin, without the cream sauce that French practice would add.