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Boiled Onions (Peel the onions and cut off)
Peel the onions and cut off the roots; drop each into cold water as soon as it is peeled. When all are ready, drain and put in a saucepan well covered with boiling water, adding a teaspoon of salt for every quart of water. Boil rapidly for ten minutes with the cover off; drain and return to the fire with fresh water. Simmer until tender; add pepper and butter and serve, or omit the butter and pepper and pour a cream sauce over the onions.
A straightforward period method whose one distinctive move — boiling hard in the first water, then finishing in fresh — is there to tame sulphur compounds and keep the onions sweet.
- The two-water trickThe first ten-minute rapid boil, uncovered, is usually explained as a way to drive off the volatile sulphur compounds that make boiled onions taste harsh, the change of water carrying them off; leaving the lid off is said to help, on the reasoning that a covered pan lets them condense back into the pot. The recipe gives no reason of its own.
- Choose the right onionThe recipe names no variety or size, but the method suits small to medium whole onions, ideally of matched size so they cook evenly. Modern sweet varieties are milder and can be cooked in a single pot of salted water.
- Cut the root, not the root endTrim only the hairy roots and leave the basal plate intact, or the onion will fall into rings during the long simmer.
- Salt ratioA teaspoon per quart is about 1 teaspoon per litre — light seasoning rather than a brine. If salting, do it in the second water as well; the recipe implies it only for the first.
- Timing"Simmer until tender" runs roughly 20 to 35 minutes for onions of 2 inches, longer for anything larger. Test with a thin skewer at the centre; onions go from firm to collapsing quickly at the end.
- Drain well before saucingBoiled onions hold a surprising amount of water between their layers. Let them sit in the colander a few minutes, or the cream sauce will thin and slide off.
- Cream sauceThe recipe does not specify the sauce; a plain white sauce of roughly 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, is the standard version of the period.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, allow 2 to 3 small onions per person as a side, or about 1½ lb for four.
Boiled onions, often served in cream, were common on American and British tables through the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the United States they survive today chiefly as a Thanksgiving side. Blanching in a first water and finishing in a second turns up repeatedly in cookbooks of this period, applied to strong-flavoured vegetables such as onions, cabbage and turnips; period writers often treated those flavours as hard on the digestion as well as unpleasant. The precise salt-to-water ratio here, rather than a vague "salt the water," fits the domestic-science emphasis of the era on measured, tested methods.