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Onions, Burnt (for Gravies)
INGREDIENTS.-lb. of onions, pint of water, lb. of moist sugar, pint of vinegar.
AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Peel and chop the onions fine, and put them into a stewpan (not tinned), with the water; let them boil for 5 minutes, then add the sugar, and simmer gently until the mixture becomes nearly black and throws out bubbles of smoke. Have ready the above proportion of boiling vinegar, strain the liquor gradually to it, and keep stirring with a wooden spoon until it is well incorporated. When cold, bottle for use.
TIME-Altogether, 1 hour.
Onions, Pickled. (A very Simple and exceedingly Good Method.)-INGREDIENTS.-Pickling onions; to each quart of vinegar, 2 teaspoonfuls of allspice, 2 teaspoonfuls of whole black pepper. ONIONS, PICKLED.
Have the onions gathered when quite dry and ripe and, with the fingers, take off the thin outside skin; then, with a silver knife (steel should not be used, as it spoils the colour of the onions), remove one more skin, when the onion will look quite clear, Have ready some very dry bottles or jars and, as fast as they are peeled, put them in.
Pour over sufficient cold vinegar to cover them, with pepper and allspice in the above proportions, taking care that each jar has its share of the latter ingredients. Tie down with bladder and put them in a dry place, and in a fortnight they will be fit for use. This is a most simple recipe and very delicious, the onions being nice and crisp. They should be eaten within 6 or 8 months after being done, as the onions are liable to become soft.
SEASONABLE from the middle of July to the end of August.
This is a Victorian gravy browning: onions cooked to the far side of caramel, then let down with hot vinegar and bottled as a colouring and flavouring liquid. A teaspoon or two darkens and deepens a pale gravy.
- The quantities have lost their fractionsAs printed, the ingredient line gives whole units where Mrs Beeton's proportions were fractional, so the exact weights and volumes cannot be recovered from this page. Any working quantities have to be reconstructed by the cook rather than read off here.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar, closest today to light or dark brown soft sugar. It caramelises faster and darker than white sugar, which is the point here.
- "Not tinned"Tinned copper pans were the norm; tin melts at about 230C, well below the temperature this mixture reaches, and vinegar attacks it besides. Use stainless steel, and nothing aluminium or cast iron once the vinegar goes in.
- "Bubbles of smoke" is the hingeThe sugar must go past dark caramel to the point where it is genuinely bitter and barely sweet. Stop short and you get syrup rather than browning; go much further and the whole pan turns acrid. Judge by colour and smell, and keep the extractor on.
- Adding the vinegarThe vinegar must be boiling, and the recipe strains the onion liquor gradually into it rather than the other way about. Either way the two must be combined slowly: hot sugar and liquid meeting suddenly will spit violently and can seize the sugar into a lump. Pour in a thin stream, stirring.
- Yield and keepingThe finished quantity is small. Bottled cold and tightly capped, the sugar and vinegar together should keep it for months in a cool cupboard; use it a teaspoon at a time.
- TimingThe stated hour is for the whole operation. On a modern hob the simmering and darkening may well take less, with the last few minutes needing constant attention.
- On the pickled onions that followThat method is a cold-vinegar pickle stored at room temperature, and it depends on full-strength vinegar covering the onions completely. Bladder is no longer used as a cover; a vinegar-proof plastic-lined lid does the same job. The silver knife is not superstition: carbon steel blades of the period discoloured cut onion.
Before bottled gravy browning became a grocery staple, kitchens often made their own, and burnt-sugar colouring is the ancestor of the caramel colour still listed on modern gravy and sauce labels. Onions add savour to what would otherwise be plain burnt sugar, and the vinegar both thins the caramel and preserves it. The fourpence "average cost" is characteristic of Mrs Beeton's household accounting, which priced every recipe so a mistress could check her cook's spending; it also shows how cheap the ingredients were beside the labour. The pickled onion recipe printed alongside is seasonal in a way modern shopping has erased, tied to the mid-July to end-of-August lifting of small onions, and its warning that they soften after six or eight months is a reminder that cold-vinegar pickles were made to be eaten within the year, not stored indefinitely.