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Baked Onions
Boil as directed in the preceding recipe, without peeling, and bake one hour, basting frequently with butter. When done, take them up carefully, peel, and lay them in the serving dish, which should be placed where it will keep warm. Set the pan upon the top of the stove, add to it a cup of milk, and, when this boils, stir in a tablespoon of flour wet with a little cold milk. When the whole is creamy, add salt and pepper, and more butter, if desired; pour the sauce over the onions and serve.
A two-stage method — onions parboiled in their skins, then roasted with butter, with a quick pan gravy made in the roasting dish. The instructions depend on a preceding recipe the modern reader does not have in front of them.
- The missing first stepThe "preceding recipe" is presumably boiled onions, but it is not reproduced here, so we cannot know its exact directions or timing; period boiled-onion recipes vary widely, from twenty minutes to an hour. Simmer the whole onions until a knife enters easily. Leaving the skins on helps them keep their shape and makes peeling easier later.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as the book assumes a wood or coal range. The recipe does not even specify a moderate oven; something around 350F for the hour is a reasonable modern equivalent, since the onions are already cooked through and you are only browning and concentrating them.
- Basting is the hingeThe baking stage adds no seasoning beyond the butter, so the frequent basting carries it; salt, pepper and the milk sauce come only at the end. The recipe specifies no quantity of butter, but 3-4 tablespoons for four large onions, basted every 10-15 minutes, works; or start them in a shallow dish with the butter already melted around them.
- Peeling hot onionsThey must be lifted whole and peeled while hot, which is awkward. Hold each with a folded towel or two spoons and slip the papery outer layers off; if the top layer of flesh tears, leave it on rather than peeling deeper.
- The sauceThis is a pan-drippings white sauce made in the roasting pan: one cup milk, one tablespoon flour slaked in cold milk. It will be thin by modern standards — closer to a pouring cream than a coating sauce. Two tablespoons of flour gives a sauce that clings.
- Deglaze firstScrape the browned butter and onion sugars off the bottom of the pan as the milk comes up to heat. That fond is the difference between an onion sauce and plain milk thickened with flour.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities for the onions themselves. Reckoning one large onion per person as a side dish, the single cup of sauce will serve about four.
Whole onions treated as a dish in their own right, rather than as seasoning, run all through nineteenth-century American and English cookery — boiled onions, creamed onions, stuffed onions, onions baked in their skins. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, whose Delineator reached an enormous audience of home sewers and housekeepers, and its vegetable chapter reflects the period's standard repertoire: a vegetable boiled, then dressed with butter or a milk-and-flour sauce. The technique here, cooking the onion in its own skin so the layers hold together and the sugars caramelize under dry heat, is the same reasoning behind roasting onions unpeeled today. The pan sauce built directly in the roasting dish is a thrifty habit of the coal-range kitchen, where the stovetop was always hot and nothing that had touched butter was washed away unused.