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Boiled Spanish Onions
Take the required number of Spanish onions, place in a saucepan of salted water, boil for thirty minutes, remove, drain and put them into another saucepan with a little butter or dripping; add a little salt and pepper, cover the pan to prevent the steam escaping, and cook slowly for about three hours. They should be occasionally basted with the dripping and care should be taken that they do not burn in cooking.
A very long, very slow braise that reduces whole onions to something close to a confit. Nothing here is difficult, but the timings assume a coal range with steady low heat.
- Spanish onionsThe large, mild, pale-skinned globe onions sold today as Spanish onions are the right thing; the flatter Bermuda type was the other large mild onion of the period. The recipe says only 'the required number' -- figure one per person, peeled but left whole, with the root trimmed flat so they sit upright.
- The hinge: gentle heatThree hours in a covered pan works only if the heat is low enough that the butter never browns. A heavy pan on the lowest burner, or a covered pot in a 300F oven, gives more reliable results than a stovetop flame you have to keep adjusting.
- DrippingRendered beef or pork fat, saved from roasting. Butter alone can scorch over three hours if the heat creeps up; a mix of butter and a neutral oil, or beef fat, is more forgiving.
- Total timeThirty minutes of boiling plus three hours of braising is not an exaggeration for onions this size, but check at ninety minutes. The onions are done when a knife slides through the center with no resistance and they are collapsing slightly.
- BastingWith the lid on and only a little fat in the pan, there may not be much liquid to baste with. Add a few spoonfuls of the onion cooking water or stock if the pan looks dry, and turn the onions rather than spooning over them.
- ServingOscar gives no accompaniment. Onions of this kind were typically served as a side dish with roast meat; the sweet, near-melting flesh wants something salty and rich beside it. Serve with the pan fat spooned over.
Boiled onions were a fixture of nineteenth-century American and English dinner tables, usually served plain or in cream sauce, and the very large mild varieties imported from Spain and Bermuda were prized because they could be cooked whole without turning acrid. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf whose 1896 Cook Book is largely general household cookery, includes several onion preparations of this kind, slow ones that develop a sweetness no quick method reaches. The long cooking here is not a lack of technique but the point of it, the same principle behind what a modern kitchen would call an onion confit.