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Onions, Spanish, Baked
INGREDIENTS for dish for 8 persons.-4 or 5 Spanish onions, salt and water. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Put the onions, with their skins on, into a saucepan of boiling water slightly salted, and let them boil quickly for an hour. Then take them out, wipe them thoroughly, wrap each one in a piece of paper separately, and bake them in a moderate oven for 2 hours, SPANISH ONIONS. or longer, should the onions be very large, They may be served in their skins and eaten with a piece of cold butter and a seasoning of pepper and salt; or they may be peeled and a good brown gravy poured over them.
TIME.-1 hour to boil, 2 hours to bake.
SEASONABLE from September to January.
A plain three-hour treatment of a mild onion, and the timings are the only part a modern cook needs to reconsider. Everything else works exactly as written.
- Moderate ovenConventionally rendered as about 350F (180C), though Victorian ranges could not be measured and the term covered a range of heats. At that heat the onions will be soft through well before the stated two hours.
- Total timeAn hour of hard boiling followed by two hours of baking is far more than a Spanish onion needs. Boil 20 to 30 minutes until a skewer meets slight resistance, then bake 45 to 60 minutes; very large ones may want 90 minutes. Left the full three hours they collapse into sweet mush, which is not unpleasant but is not what the recipe promises.
- Spanish onionsThe large, pale, mild-flavoured storage onion, often sold now as a sweet or Spanish onion and typically weighing well over half a pound each. A yellow cooking onion will work but is sharper; do not substitute red.
- The paper wrappingThe recipe specifies only "a piece of paper" for each onion; the likely purpose is to hold in steam and keep the skins from scorching. Buttered parchment does the same job; foil is the modern default and gives a slightly wetter result.
- Skins onLeave the roots and papery outer layers intact for both stages. They hold the onion together through the long cooking and peel away cleanly at the table.
- Cost8d is eightpence in pre-decimal money, an indication of how cheap the dish was in its own day rather than anything about present-day prices.
- ServingStated as a dish for 8, from 4 or 5 onions, so roughly half an onion each with cold butter, pepper and salt. As a modern side dish, allow one onion per two people.
- SeasonableSeptember to January is the window for cured storage onions from the British harvest. Year-round supply removes the constraint, though autumn onions are still drier and keep their shape better.
Baked onions of this kind belong to the plainest end of Victorian cookery: cheap, filling and requiring almost no attention. The "Spanish" onion was a genuine import category in the nineteenth century, prized because its mildness let it be eaten as a vegetable in its own right rather than used only as a flavouring. The recipe offers two ways of serving: skins on with a lump of cold butter, or peeled and napped with brown gravy. The instruction to wrap each onion in paper is a reminder of how much Victorian ovens varied; paper was cheap and to hand, doing the job a modern cook would give to foil.