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Boiled Onions
Put onions in cold water and remove skins while under water. Drain, place in saucepan, and cover with boiling salted water. Boil 5 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, and cook 5 minutes. Season with butter, salt and pepper.
A straightforward turn-of-the-century vegetable dish whose only real technique is the double water change, done to tame the sulphur compounds in strong storage onions.
- Why two watersThe five-minute blanch and fresh boiling water carry off the harshest sulphur notes of old winter onions. Sweet or mild modern onions need it far less; one change of water is plenty, and with Vidalias or Cipollini you can skip it.
- An hour is for large onionsThe timing assumes whole medium-to-large storage onions, which do need 45-60 minutes to go tender without collapsing. Small boiling onions or pearl onions are done in 15-25 minutes. Test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Peeling under waterThis is the one instruction worth keeping. Submerging the onions keeps the volatile sulphur compounds from reaching your eyes.
- Keeping them whole"Soft, but not broken" suggests holding the pot at a gentle cook rather than a hard rolling boil in the second water. Leaving the root end intact helps hold the layers together.
- The milk finish"A small quantity" is not defined; add only enough to moisten the onions rather than to cover them. Keep it below a simmer for those last five minutes or it will catch at the edges.
- Salting the waterThis recipe does not give a quantity. About a teaspoon of salt per quart is a workable modern rule.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield or onion count. Reckon on about one medium onion per person as a side dish.
Boiled onions belonged to the standard American winter table, where root-cellar keepers -- onions, turnips, parsnips, cabbage -- carried households from autumn through spring. They appear beside roast turkey and boiled beef in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century menus, often finished with milk or a cream sauce, in the manner of the creamed onions still served at Thanksgiving. The entry's form -- no ingredient list, no yield, just the sequence of operations -- was common in cookbooks of the period, which assumed a cook knew what a saucepan of onions ought to look like and needed only to be told the order of things. The double blanching is consistent with produce that was stored for months and grew fierce in the process.