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Dressed Raw Onions
Peel some onions, chop fine, put in water with a very little salt and let them soak for an hour or so. Remove them, drain, place on a dish and pour over a mixture of one-half gill of vinegar, two tablespoonfuls each of made mustard, chili vinegar and sugar, and one tablespoonful of salt. Put a lump of ice on top and garnish the dish with curled parsley. If the parsley is eaten after the onions it is supposed to take the smell away.
A raw onion relish rather than a salad course, meant to sit on the table beside cold meats. The soak is what makes it work, and the salt figure is the one number to treat with suspicion.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a gill of vinegar is 4 tablespoons, or a scant quarter cup. That is the total acid apart from the chili vinegar.
- The salt is out of proportionA full tablespoon of salt poured over a dish of chopped onions, already brined for an hour, gives something closer to a pickle than a dressing. Start with a teaspoon and taste; the original figure suits a table condiment eaten in small spoonfuls, not a side dish.
- The hour-long soak is the hingeSalted water draws out the sulphur compounds that make raw onion harsh and repeating. Do not shorten it, and drain thoroughly, pressing the onion in a sieve, or the dressing will be diluted into a puddle.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from a jar, not dry mustard powder. The recipe does not say which sort; a smooth English or French-style paste is the likely intention, and Dijon is the closest everyday equivalent.
- Chili vinegarVinegar steeped with hot chilies, once a standard cruet item and now uncommon. Substitute a hot pepper sauce with a vinegar base, or steep a couple of dried chilies in cider vinegar overnight.
- Onion choiceNothing is specified. A firm yellow or Spanish onion holds up best to the soak; sweeter varieties are softer to begin with and give less of the crispness the brining is for.
- The lump of iceA block of ice on the dish did the chilling at table. Chill the finished dish for an hour instead, and skip the ice, which would only water down the dressing.
- YieldThe recipe says only 'some onions'. Three medium onions is a reasonable reading, enough for six to eight as a relish alongside cold roast beef, ham or cheese.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from 1893 and put his name to a cookbook of some nine hundred pages in 1896, a compendium of what a large American hotel kitchen was expected to produce at any hour. Dressed raw onions belong to the older side of that repertoire: a sharp, cheap relish of the sort that sat on chophouse and tavern tables through the nineteenth century, closer kin to pickled onions and to the vinegar cruet than to anything French. The final line, that parsley eaten after onions takes the smell away, is a folk remedy of long standing rather than a hotel discovery, and the chlorophyll explanation usually attached to it came much later.