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Baked Onions
The large Spanish or Bermuda onions are best for this purpose, Wash the outside clean, put into a sauce-pan with slightly salted the outside clean, put into a sauce-pan with slightly salted water, and boil an hour, replenishing the water with more (boiling hot) as it boils away. Then turn off water; take out onions and lay upon a cloth that all moisture may be absorbed; roll each in a piece of buttered tissue-paper, twisting it at the top to keep it closed, and bake in a slow oven nearly an hour, or until tender all through. Peel, put in a deep dish, and brown slightly, basting freely with butter; this will take fifteen minutes more. Season with pepper and salt, and pour melted butter over the top.
A long, gentle method that treats the onion as a whole vegetable rather than a flavouring — boiled in its skin, wrapped and baked, then browned in butter. The wrapping is the part that needs translating.
- Buttered tissue-paperTissue-paper of the period was a light, plain paper used in the kitchen much as we use parchment. Modern tissue is not food-safe; use buttered parchment twisted at the top, or foil, which holds the shape better but browns less.
- A slow ovenRoughly 250-325F; 300F works well here. The onion has already been boiled through, so the bake is about concentrating rather than cooking; at higher heat the wrapping scorches and the outer layers collapse.
- The browning stepBaking at 300F will not colour anything. For the final fifteen minutes raise the oven to 425F, or run the peeled onions under a broiler, basting with butter as directed.
- Onions to buy"Spanish" and "Bermuda" both meant a large, mild sweet onion (the Bermuda flattish, the Spanish more globe-shaped). Vidalia, Walla Walla or any large sweet yellow onion answers; a sharp storage onion will not sweeten enough over this treatment.
- The boilBoiling whole in the skin for an hour is not an error — the papery skin keeps the layers from sliding apart. Trim the root end flat but do not cut into it, or the onion will fall open in the water.
- Drying mattersThe cloth is not fussiness. A wet onion steams inside its wrapper instead of drying down, and the finished dish turns watery under the butter.
- TimingAllow about two and a quarter hours in total: an hour's boil, nearly an hour's bake, and fifteen minutes to brown. Larger onions want longer; test with a skewer, which should meet no resistance at the centre.
- YieldOne onion per person as a side dish. The recipe gives no quantity.
Baked whole onions were a familiar American side dish in the second half of the nineteenth century. The large mild imports the recipe calls for were a genuine commodity: Bermuda onions were shipped to eastern US ports in quantity during the nineteenth century and were prized precisely because they could be eaten in bulk without the bite of a domestic storage onion. The long timetable here reflects a kitchen where a range was lit all day anyway, and an unattended slow oven cost nothing to use.