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Scalloped Onions
Cut boiled onions into quarters; put them in a baking dish and mix well with cream sauce; cover with bread crumbs and bits of butter and place in the oven until the crumbs are browned. 6 onions
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce and boil an onion. The gaps are worth filling in.
- The onionsMedium yellow or white onions, peeled and boiled whole in salted water until a knife slides in easily — roughly 25 to 35 minutes depending on size. Drain them thoroughly and let the steam escape before saucing, or the dish turns watery in the oven.
- Cream sauceIn a book of this period this generally means a medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and half cream, cooked until it coats a spoon, with salt and pepper.
- Oven heatThe instruction is simply "until the crumbs are browned," with no temperature given. A modern oven at about 400F for 20 to 25 minutes works; the sauce should bubble at the edges before the top colors.
- CrumbsDry bread crumbs, not fresh, and not the sandy commercial kind. Toss them with the melted butter rather than dotting butter on top and the crust browns evenly instead of in patches.
- QuarteringCut the onions after boiling, not before, so the layers stay in loose petals rather than falling into strands. Quarters of a large onion may want halving again.
- YieldSix onions serves four to six as a side dish.
"Scalloped" — older spelling escalloped — is generally traced to food cooked and served in a scallop shell, and by the nineteenth century in American kitchens it had come to mean any dish baked in a shallow dish with sauce and a crumb top, whether or not a shell was involved. Onions were an obvious candidate: cheap, storable through winter, and improved considerably by cream and butter.