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Boiled Onions (Cover the onions with boiling)
Cover the onions with boiling water. Add salt and boil three minutes. Cook two hours or longer, using one hot radiator. Drain; season with salt, pepper and butter; or serve with cream sauce.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: food is brought to a boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box with a preheated soapstone or cast-iron disc and left to finish on stored heat. Almost everything that needs explaining here is in the equipment rather than the ingredients.
- The hinge: it must go in boilingThe three-minute boil is not a token gesture. The cooker supplies only the stored heat of the radiator and cannot bring a cold pot up to temperature, so the pail should go into the box at a full boil. Onions loaded in lukewarm would spend the two-hour hold at temperatures too low to cook them properly.
- "One hot radiator"The radiators were soapstone or iron discs heated on the range or in the oven until very hot, then set in the well of the cooker under (and sometimes over) the food pail. One disc is the lower-heat setting; period directions generally call for one for vegetables and cereals and two for roasts and dried beans.
- Modern equivalentA slow cooker on low for 2 to 3 hours does the same job, as does a heavy lidded pot brought to a boil and buried in towels in a cooler. On a conventional stove, whole medium onions simmer tender in 30 to 40 minutes.
- Onion size and donenessTwo hours suits whole medium yellow or white onions, about 2 inches across. Quartered or sliced onions collapse to mush at that length; if you are using a slow cooker with cut onions, cut the time roughly in half.
- Salt the water properlyThe original gives no quantity. About a teaspoon per quart of water is right, and it seasons the onions from the outside in over the long hold.
- Keep the cooking liquidOnion water is mild and sweet and makes a better base for the cream sauce than plain milk alone. Save a cup when you drain.
- The cream sauceStandard white sauce of the period: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and half onion liquid, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- YieldFigure two medium onions per person as a side dish; a 2-quart cooker pail holds about eight, enough for four.
Fireless cookery had a serious vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and the early 1920s, and cookbooks of the period often carried a whole section on it. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be fired and tended, and a well-insulated box let a cook capture heat once and let it work all afternoon while the kitchen stayed cool. Commercial models were sold with soapstone discs, and manuals of the day showed how to build one at home from a packing crate lined with hay, excelsior or ground cork. Boiled onions were a fixture of the plain American dinner table long before that, usually served whole under a cream sauce alongside roast meat, and they suited the method well: a vegetable that wants long, gentle, unattended heat and cannot easily be scorched. The technique faded as gas and electric ranges made a controlled low flame cheap and simple, but it survives in the slow cooker and, more directly, in the vacuum-flask cooking still common in parts of Asia.