Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Baked Stuffed Spanish Onions
Baked Stuffed Spanish Onions
Peel six medium-sized Spanish onions, take out the centers with a vegetable scoop, parboil them for three minutes and turn them upside down on a cloth to drain; when drained fill the inside with sausage forcemeat. Line the bottom of a sautepan with a piece of lard skin and one carrot and one onion both cut up, lay the onions on top, moisten with gills of broth, and cover with buttered paper; put it in the oven to glaze for forty minutes, taking care to baste frequently. Place the onions on a hot dish, strain the gravy over them, and serve.
A straightforward braise once the archaic kitchen vocabulary is decoded. The instruction that matters most is the buttered paper and frequent basting: the onions cook in a shallow film of broth, and without the cover and the basting the tops scorch before the centers give way.
- Gills of brothThe original gives no number before "gills"; a gill is half a cup, so the intended quantity has to be guessed. Enough broth to film the pan bottom — on the order of a cup for six onions — will reduce down over the time given.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature, and "to glaze" describes the basted, glossy finish rather than a setting. A moderate oven, somewhere around 350–375F, suits the forty minutes specified; much hotter and the broth scorches before the time is up.
- Lard skinThe rind cut from fresh pork fatback, used to keep the onions off the pan bottom and to enrich the gravy. A couple of slices of salt pork or unsmoked bacon do the same job; without it the vegetables catch.
- Sausage forcemeatPlain bulk pork sausage meat, seasoned and bound with a little soaked bread or egg. Figure about a pound for six onions. Cook until the stuffing reaches 160F at the center — with large onions this can take longer than forty minutes, so check rather than trust the clock.
- ParboilingThree minutes only sets the outer layers and makes the shells manageable; it is not meant to cook them. Turning them cut-side down to drain matters, since trapped water will thin the gravy.
- Vegetable scoopA melon baller or a small sturdy spoon. Leave two or three outer layers as the wall, and chop the removed centers into the forcemeat rather than discarding them.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside. It holds in steam while still letting the tops color, which a tight lid will not do.
- PanA "sautepan" is a shallow, straight-sided pan that goes from burner to oven. A skillet or braiser of the same shape works; a deep pot steams the onions pale.
- YieldSix onions, one apiece as a substantial first course or light supper dish, or half an onion each alongside roast meat.
Stuffed onions belong to the classical French repertoire — oignons farcis, braised on a bed of aromatics and pork rind, with the reduced cooking liquid strained over as the sauce. Large, mild, pale-skinned bulbs sold in America as "Spanish onions" were increasingly available by the late nineteenth century, and their size and sweetness made them the obvious candidate for stuffing where smaller, sharper cooking onions would not hold a filling or would overwhelm it.