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Glazed Onions
Peel small silver skinned onions, and cook in boiling water fifteen minutes. Drain, dry on cheese-cloth, put in a buttered baking-dish, add highly seasoned brown stock to cover bottom of dish, sprinkle with sugar, and bake until soft, basting with stock in pan.
A short, forgiving side dish that depends almost entirely on the quality of the stock and on the patience of the basting. A few points of translation.
- Silver-skinned onionsThese are small white boiling onions, roughly an inch across; frozen pearl onions or peeled cipollini stand in well. If using frozen, skip the boiling stage entirely and go straight to the dish.
- Peeling made easierTrim the root end only, drop the onions into boiling water for a minute, then slip the skins off. Leaving the root plate intact keeps the layers from sliding apart during the long bake.
- Brown stockThe book asks only for a rich, well-seasoned brown stock; in books of this period that generally means a beef-based stock. A good commercial beef stock reduced by a third, with salt and pepper adjusted upward, gets you close. Weak stock produces a pale, watery result rather than a glaze.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the book names no oven at all. Around 350F suits the purpose; the aim is slow evaporation, not browning. Expect roughly 40 to 50 minutes, basting every ten, but go by the onions.
- The hingeThe glaze forms as the stock reduces to a syrup around the onions, so use only enough liquid to film the bottom of the dish, an eighth of an inch or so. Too much and the onions poach; you will be left with soup and no gloss.
- SugarA teaspoon or two for a pound of onions is plenty. It is there to help the stock set into a glaze, not to sweeten what is already a sweet vegetable.
- YieldA pound of small onions serves four as a side. They hold well and reheat without harm.
Glazing is a French technique, *glacer*, carried into American cooking through the professional kitchen and the cooking schools that copied it: vegetables cooked in a small quantity of well-flavored liquid until that liquid reduces to a coating. Fannie Farmer's book, first published in 1896 out of the Boston Cooking School, treated small glazed onions as a standard accompaniment to roast beef, braised beef and game. The recipe's assumption that a cook simply has "highly seasoned brown stock" on hand says a good deal about the period kitchen. Silver-skinned onions were then a familiar market item, sold small for pickling and for exactly this sort of dish.