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Scalloped Onions
Cut Boiled Onions in quarters. Put in a buttered bakingdish, cover with White Sauce I, sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs, and place on centre grate in oven to brown crumbs.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already have boiled onions and a pan of white sauce standing by, as any reader working through this book in order would have. Fill in those two blanks and it comes together in minutes.
- The hinge: everything is already cookedOnions and sauce both go into the dish hot and finished. The oven is only there to brown crumbs, so 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Long baking breaks the sauce and turns the onions to mush.
- "Centre grate in oven"The middle rack of a hot oven. The book gives no temperatures, so judge by the crumbs; if they are pale after 15 minutes, move the dish higher or under the broiler for a minute rather than leaving it to sit.
- Boiled OnionsThe cross-reference is to the book's own entry: onions peeled and simmered in salted water until a skewer slides through, roughly 25 to 35 minutes depending on size, and large enough to quarter afterwards. Drain them very well before quartering; residual water thins the sauce in the dish.
- White Sauce IThe book numbers its white sauces; follow the proportions given in its own entry rather than assuming a thickness. As a working guide, 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to each cup of milk, seasoned with salt and pepper; about 4 tablespoons each to 2 cups milk will coat 2 pounds of onions.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrush plain unsalted crackers or saltines to coarse crumbs and toss with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter per half cup of crumbs, until they clump slightly. Panko will work but browns faster and tastes less of the period.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a working estimate, two pounds of onions with the sauce above would fill about a 1 1/2-quart dish and serve six as a side.
- SeasoningBoiled onions are bland and the sauce is mild, so salt more assertively than instinct suggests. Grated cheese stirred into the sauce is a common variation of the same era, though the book keeps this version plain.
Scalloped dishes run through nineteenth-century American cookery: anything cut up, bound with a sauce, crumbed and browned earned the name, from oysters to potatoes to cabbage. The word is generally traced to the shell-shaped dishes such mixtures were once baked and served in, and by Fannie Farmer's day it had come to mean the method rather than the vessel. Cracker crumbs rather than bread crumbs are the New England signature here — the common cracker was a pantry staple in the region, and Farmer appears to have favoured it. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the book's structure: boiled onions and white sauce are each given their own entry, and later recipes are built by assembly, teaching cooks a system rather than a list of dishes.