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Boiled Onions
These should be as white as milk when served. In peeling them, remove all of the green leaves, boil for one hour in plenty of salted water, changing the water after the first fifteen minutes' boiling. This will make the vegetable more delicate in flavor. When done, drain well, place in the serving dish and pour over them a cream sauce.
A plain nineteenth-century vegetable dish that survives chiefly as the creamed onions of a holiday table. The only real problem is the timing.
- An hour is far too longSmall whole onions are tender in 20 to 30 minutes of simmering; anything much beyond that collapses them into strings and slush. Test with a skewer at 20 minutes and pull them as soon as it slides through with no resistance.
- Which onionsThe recipe does not say, but the method suits small whole boiling or silverskin onions, an inch or so across, rather than sliced ones. Frozen peeled pearl onions are the nearest modern equivalent and need only 8 to 10 minutes.
- "Remove all of the green leaves"The instruction implies onions arriving with their tops still attached. Trim the stem end flush and leave the root end intact so the layers do not telescope apart in the pot.
- Changing the waterDraining after the first 15 minutes and refilling with fresh boiling salted water does genuinely mute the sulphurous edge. If you shorten the total time as above, change the water at about 8 minutes instead.
- Keeping them whiteFor milk-white onions keep the water at a gentle simmer rather than a hard rolling boil, and avoid cast iron or unlined aluminium, which can grey them. A squeeze of lemon in the second water helps hold the colour, though acid will also slow the softening a little.
- The cream sauceThe recipe assumes the reader knows the sauce. A light white sauce suits: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 1/2 cups milk or half milk and half onion cooking liquid, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Drain the onions thoroughly or the sauce will thin out on the dish.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of small onions with the sauce above serves six as a side dish.
Boiled onions under a white sauce were standard American table furniture by the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book in 1911, and the insistence that they be "as white as milk" is characteristic of the period's cooking: appearance was a mark of skill, and a grey or broken onion advertised a careless kitchen. The double water is an old and widespread trick for taming strong vegetables. Butterick's book came from a pattern company whose business was selling household competence to middle-class women, which explains the brevity here; a reader was assumed to already know how to make a cream sauce and needed only to be told which vegetable to pour it over.