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Onions in Cream
Prepare and cook as Boiled Onions, changing the water twice during boiling; drain, and cover with Cream or Thin White Sauce.
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you have already read "Boiled Onions" and "Thin White Sauce" a few pages away. Here is what those two entries contain and where modern practice differs.
- The hinge: changing the waterDraining and refilling twice was a common way to tame the sulfur compounds in strong storage onions. With today's milder white boiling onions it probably costs some sweetness along with the pungency; one change of water is likely plenty, and none at all is defensible if the onions are fresh.
- What "Boiled Onions" meansSmall white onions, peeled and dropped into boiling salted water, cooked until a skewer slides through the centre without resistance. The period entry allows a long boil, up to about an hour for larger onions; modern practice reckons rather less, so go by the skewer. Peeling under water, as the book advises, genuinely does reduce the eye-stinging.
- Thin White SauceIn this book that is one tablespoon butter and one tablespoon flour cooked together, then one cup of scalded milk whisked in, with salt and pepper. The "medium" sauce used for creamed dishes doubles both butter and flour. Thin is correct here because the drained onions carry water and will loosen it further.
- "Cover with Cream"The alternative is literal: hot heavy or light cream poured over the drained onions, seasoned with salt and pepper. No thickening at all. It works best if the onions have been drained thoroughly.
- Drain hardBoiled onions hold water between their layers. Let them sit in the colander several minutes, or return them to the dry hot pan for a moment, or the sauce will thin into milk on the plate.
- Keeping them wholeTrim the root end flat but do not cut it away, or the layers slide apart in the water. A shallow cross scored in the root helps the centre cook at the same rate as the outside.
- YieldAbout two pounds of small onions with one cup of sauce serves six as a side dish.
Creamed onions are a fixture of nineteenth-century American vegetable cookery, and this terse entry shows how Fannie Farmer's book was built: a base method stated once, then a chain of variations that each change one thing. Boiling vegetables in two or three changes of water was often recommended in the period, and is said to have been applied to onions, cabbage and turnips alike, resting on the belief that strong-flavored vegetables were also hard to digest. The pairing with a flour-thickened milk sauce reflects the same school's faith in white sauce as a universal solvent for plain boiled food; the Boston Cooking School taught it in graded thicknesses, thin through thick, so a cook could name a proportion rather than guess. In American homes the dish is commonly associated with the Thanksgiving table, where it still turns up beside the turkey.