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Steamed Stuffed Onions
Peel eight large onions and boil them for ten minutes, salting slightly. Remove them, drain quite dry, and push out about half the insides. Chop the part taken out very small, together with a little sausage meat, add one teacupful of breadcrumbs, one egg, and salt and pepper to taste. Put this mixture into the cavity of the onions, piling it a little on the top and bottom so that none shall be left. Arrange them in a deep pan, put it in a steamer over a saucepan of water, and steam for an hour and a half. Put the pan into the oven to brown the tops of the onions, adding one breakfast cupful of gravy to prevent their burning. Arrange them tastefully on a dish, and serve very hot.
A straightforward stuffed vegetable, but the measurements are period ones and the cooking time assumes a stovetop steamer rather than an oven.
- Teacupful and breakfast cupfulA teacupful in turn-of-the-century American usage is roughly 3/4 cup, not a full measuring cup; a breakfast cupful is a generous cup, call it 8 to 10 fl oz. So the stuffing takes about 3/4 cup of breadcrumbs and the browning stage about a cup of gravy.
- Choose the right onionsLarge yellow or Spanish onions, 3 inches or more across, are what this needs. Trim the root end flat but leave the base intact so the shells stand up and the filling stays in.
- The ten-minute boilThis is a parboil to soften the layers enough to hollow them without splitting. Ten minutes in salted water is about right for large onions; drain them upside down and let them cool enough to handle before you push out the centers.
- Sausage meatBulk pork sausage, uncased, is the direct equivalent. "A little" is vague; about 1/2 lb for eight onions binds the stuffing without overwhelming it, and it should go in raw so it cooks with the onion.
- An hour and a half is not excessiveSteam is a gentle heat and the filling is enclosed in several layers of onion. The long time is what brings the raw sausage through and collapses the onion to sweetness. Check that the stuffing has reached 160F before browning.
- Browning temperatureThe original leaves the oven unspecified. A hot oven, 425F, for 15 to 20 minutes will color the tops without drying what is underneath. The gravy in the pan is there to keep the bottoms from scorching, so keep it topped up.
- The gravyThis most likely means a brown meat gravy or well-reduced stock rather than a sauce made from these onions. Beef or veal stock, lightly thickened, would suit.
- YieldEight onions, one or two per person: a substantial side for eight, or a main course for four with bread and the pan gravy spooned over.
Stuffed onions belong to a long European tradition of hollowing out a vegetable and filling it with forcemeat, and they show up in English and French household cookery through the nineteenth century as a way of making a small amount of meat feed a table. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf, is far broader than hotel cooking; alongside the elaborate service dishes it carries a great deal of plain domestic material of exactly this sort. The steamer rather than the oven is the period detail worth noticing: a covered pan set over boiling water was common in a coal-range kitchen, where oven heat was harder to hold steady than a pot of water on the hob.