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Boiled Onions
Put onions in cold water and remove skins while under water. Drain, put in a saucepan, and cover with boiling salted water; boil five minutes, drain, and again cover with boiling salted water. Cook one hour or until soft, but not broken. Drain, add a small quantity of milk, cook five minutes, and season with butter, salt, and pepper.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment that survives largely intact in modern cookery, with one timing that needs adjusting.
- The hinge: change the waterThe five-minute parboil and fresh change of boiling salted water is the whole point of the method. It draws off the harshest sulfur compounds and leaves the onions sweet rather than acrid. Skipping it gives you a noticeably sharper dish.
- Peel under waterWorking with the onions submerged helps keep the volatile sulfur compounds from reaching your eyes. It helps, and it costs nothing.
- One hour is too longThe recipe does not specify size, and an hour suits only large, mature onions cooked whole. Medium yellow or white onions of about 2 inches will be tender in 25 to 35 minutes; small boiling onions in 15 to 20. Test with a skewer and pull them the moment they yield, since the instruction "soft, but not broken" is the real target, not the clock.
- Choose the right onionUse firm yellow, white or true boiling onions. Sweet varieties such as Vidalia collapse and turn watery under this treatment.
- Trim, do not coreCut the root end flush but leave it attached. A scored or hollowed root lets the layers slide apart in the pot.
- "A small quantity of milk"About 1/2 cup for six to eight onions, added to the drained pan and cooked the five minutes the recipe calls for. Whole milk holds better than skim; keep it below a hard boil or it will catch on the bottom.
- Salting the waterRoughly 1 tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts, as for pasta. Both boils should be salted, since the first one is discarded.
- YieldTwo medium onions per person as a side dish. Serve immediately in their milk with the butter stirred through; they lose their gloss quickly as they sit.
Boiled onions were a standing fixture of the American winter table, and Fannie Farmer's 1896 book records the technique at its most economical: no cream sauce, no crumbs, just onions, a change of water, and enough milk to give the dish a coating. The double-boiling trick is older than the book and is often said to have been common in English and American cookery of the period, when onions were pulled from cellar storage and could be fiercely strong by midwinter. The Boston Cooking School's contribution was less the method than the discipline around it, Farmer's insistence on level measurements and repeatable procedure being what set her volume apart from the more approximate cookery books that came before it. Boiled onions still turn up on American Thanksgiving tables, usually now under a cream sauce that this bare version only hints at.