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Stuffed Onions
Remove skins from onions, and parboil ten minutes in boiling salted water to cover. Turn upside down to cool, and remove part of centres. Fill cavities with equal parts of finely chopped cooked chicken, stale soft bread crumbs, and finely chopped onion which was removed, seasoned with salt and pepper, and moistened with cream or melted butter. Place in buttered shallow baking-pan, sprinkle with buttered crumbs, and bake in a moderate oven until onions are soft. Creamed Oyster Plant (Salsify) Wash, scrape, and put at once into cold acidulated water to prevent discoloration. Cut in inch slices, cook in boiling salted water until soft, drain, and add to White Sauce I. Oyster plant is in season from October to March.
Two recipes sit on this page: onions stuffed with a chicken-and-crumb forcemeat, and creamed salsify. Both are straightforward, but the onions depend almost entirely on getting them tender without letting them collapse.
- Onion size and the parboilUse medium yellow or Spanish onions, roughly 3 inches across and as flat-bottomed as you can find so they sit upright. Ten minutes of parboiling only softens the outer layers; the interior finishes in the oven, so do not extend it or the shells will slump when you hollow them.
- Hollowing them outAfter cooling, cut a thin slice from the top and work the centre out with a melon baller or small spoon, leaving two or three layers as a wall. The removed centres are an ingredient, not waste, so chop them fine and keep them.
- "Moderate oven"350F. Expect 40 to 60 minutes depending on size; the onions are done when a knife slides into the side wall with no resistance. Cover with foil for the first half if the crumb topping is browning ahead of the onion.
- Stale soft crumbs vs. buttered crumbsSoft crumbs are torn from the interior of day-old bread, not dried and ground. Buttered crumbs for the top are crumbs tossed with melted butter, about 1 tablespoon per half cup, which is what makes them brown rather than scorch.
- The chickenCooked, cooled roast or poached chicken chopped fine suits the recipe, which simply calls for cooked chicken; a cup of it, with the equal parts of crumb and chopped onion alongside, should fill roughly four to six onions.
- MoisteningAdd cream or melted butter until the filling just holds together when pressed, no more. A wet filling weeps into the pan and the onions steam instead of roasting.
- YieldNo yield is given; expect roughly four to six stuffed onions, enough for about four as a side.
- On the salsifyAcidulated water means cold water with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per quart; scraped salsify browns within minutes otherwise. Inch slices take 20 to 30 minutes to become tender.
- White Sauce IThe book's white sauce, a butter-and-flour roux cooked with milk, from its own sauce chapter. If you are not working from that chapter, any standard bechamel with salt and a little pepper serves.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was built for households that cooked from what was already in the larder, and stuffed onions are a plain example: cooked chicken reappears bound with stale bread and the onion's own scooped-out centre, so that little is bought and little is thrown out. Salsify was commonly called oyster plant in nineteenth-century America for a faint shellfish note that cooks either tasted or did not, and it was a familiar winter root in the Northeast before it slipped out of general use. Farmer's note that it is in season from October to March reflects a market calendar that mattered before refrigerated shipping, when a vegetable chapter had to tell you when a thing could be had at all.