Home › Vegetables › Stuffed Onions
Stuffed Onions
Select one large dry onion for each person. Boil in plenty of water, uncovered, until about half done. When cool enough to handle, remove part of / are the centers, leaving a shell. Season the inside of each onion with salt and pepper. Chop the part removed and add to it the following mixture, the proportion being sufficient to fill about six onions.
Mix together the chopped onion centers, one cupful cold cooked oats, one-fourth cupful grated cheese, half a cupful dry crumbs (cornmeal breadcrumbs are good), one teaspooniul sage, one teaspoonful Worcestershire sauce, one cupful white sauce, and salt and pepper to taste. Stuff the onions, sprinkle the top with grated cheese or oiled crumbs and bake in a moderate oven half an hour.
Serve plain or with white sauce poured over them. A little left-over meat or fish may be used in place of the crumbs if on hand.
A straightforward stuffed vegetable that depends almost entirely on how far you take the initial boil. A few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour at that temperature will set the filling and brown the crumb topping; if the onions were properly par-boiled they need no more.
- "Half done" is the hingeBoil large onions, uncovered as directed, until they are yielding at the outer layers but still firm enough at the core to hold a shell when hollowed; depending on size this is likely to take somewhere around 15-20 minutes. Fully soft onions collapse the moment you scoop them, and no amount of baking will rescue the shape.
- Dry onionAn ordinary cured storage onion, not a fresh spring or sweet onion. Yellow or Spanish onions of 3 inches or more across work best; sweet varieties carry too much water and slump.
- Cold cooked oatsLeftover cooked oatmeal, not rolled oats out of the box. Cook rolled oats in water, cool them until firm, and measure a cupful; the intent is a stiff, cold porridge that binds the stuffing.
- White sauceA basic milk bechamel, roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. The recipe uses a cupful in the stuffing and suggests more as a sauce at table, so make a double batch.
- "Dry crumbs (cornmeal breadcrumbs)"The line is garbled in the original text; it means dried breadcrumbs, with cornmeal or corn-bread crumbs offered as a good alternative. "Oiled crumbs" for the topping are crumbs tossed with melted butter or oil so they brown rather than scorch.
- SageA teaspoonful of dried powdered sage in six onions is assertive by modern taste. Start with half that if your sage is fresh stock, and adjust after tasting the raw filling.
- Yield and servingThe filling fills about six onions, one per person as written. Substantial enough to serve as a light main course with a salad; as a side dish, half an onion each is plenty.
- The meat substitutionLeft-over meat or fish replaces the crumbs, not the oats, so the filling still binds. Chop it fine and make sure it is thoroughly reheated in the oven.
Stuffed onions belong to the large family of hollowed-and-filled vegetable dishes that filled the vegetable chapters of American cookbooks in the early twentieth century, when a cookbook was expected to show how one cup of leftovers could be turned into a dinner for six. The cooked-oatmeal binder is the telling detail: oats were promoted heavily in this period as cheap, wholesome and expandable, and the breakfast pot could evidently be pressed into service at supper. Worcestershire sauce and grated cheese do the work that meat would otherwise do, giving savour to a meatless plate without calling it a sacrifice, and the closing line about left-over meat or fish "if on hand" makes the economy explicit. The technique itself is old and unfussy, par-boil to soften, hollow, fill and brown, and it is the same one applied to peppers, tomatoes and marrows elsewhere in books of this kind.