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Onion Garnish for Fricassee
Cut off a thin slice from both ends of two dozen large onions, put them into one quart of boiling water and blanch for ten minutes. Take them out, drain, and when they are cold, remove the yellow and first white skins; put them in a saucepan with two breakfast cupfuls of water, and a teaspoonful each of salt and sugar; boil slowly until done; remove and drain, and they are ready for use. They should be put into the fricassee at least five minutes before serving.
A side preparation rather than a dish in its own right: onions blanched, peeled, then simmered in lightly salted and sweetened water until tender, held ready to drop into a fricassee at the last moment. A few of Oscar's terms need translating.
- What size onionThe recipe says "large," but two dozen onions boiled in only one quart of water, and served whole as a garnish, reads more like small button or pearl onions of roughly equal size than full-sized cooking onions. Modern frozen pearl onions come already peeled and skip the first two steps entirely.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup; period usage varies, with figures of roughly 8 to 10 fl oz cited, so two cupfuls is somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups. Use enough to just cover the onions in a single layer; the exact figure matters less than the depth.
- Blanching then peelingTen minutes in boiling water is what loosens the skins so both the papery yellow layer and the tough first white layer slip off. Trimming both ends before blanching, as directed, is what lets you squeeze them out.
- Don't cut the root end too deepTake only a thin slice. Cut into the root plate and the onion falls apart into rings during the second cooking, which defeats the point of a garnish.
- "Boil slowly until done"A bare simmer, 15 to 25 minutes for small onions depending on size. They should yield to a knife tip without collapsing; hard boiling breaks them up and clouds the liquid.
- The sugarA teaspoon in that much water is not for sweetness but to round out the onion's sulphury edge and encourage a faint gloss. If you reduce the cooking liquid with a knob of butter instead of draining it, you get a proper glaze.
- Five minutes before servingThe recipe sets a minimum, not a maximum: the onions go in at least five minutes before service. They are already cooked, so this is about warming them through and letting them take up a little sauce rather than cooking them further.
- YieldTwo dozen small onions is a garnish quantity for a good-sized fricassee rather than a dish in itself. The recipe says nothing about storage, though it does treat the onions as finished and "ready for use" ahead of service.
Oscar Tschirky's book catalogues the component parts of restaurant cookery as much as finished dishes, and this is a fair example: a garnish prepared in bulk in the morning and dropped into whatever needed it at service. Small glazed onions belong to the French repertoire that governed American hotel kitchens around 1900, where they appear alongside mushrooms and lardons in the classic garnitures for fricassees, blanquettes and braised meats. The two-stage method here, blanch and peel, then cook gently in seasoned water, is the standard professional treatment and survives essentially unchanged; only the labour has shifted, since modern cooks buy them frozen.