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Boiled or Fried Onions
Wash and peel, boil ten minutes, pour off this water, again add boiling water, boil a few minutes and drain a second time; pour on boiling water, add salt and boil for one hour; place in a colander, turn a saucer over them, and press firmly to drive off all the water; place in a dish and add butter and pepper. Or, about half an hour before they are done, turn a pint of milk into the water in which they are boiling, and, when tender, season as above. Old onions require two hours to boil. To fry onions, slice and boil ten minutes each time in three waters, drain, fry in butter or beef drippings, stir often, season, and serve hot.
This is boiled onion as a plain vegetable dish, a staple of nineteenth-century Southern tables. The repeated changes of water are the whole technique, and modern cooks will want to scale the timings back sharply.
- The three watersDraining and refreshing the water twice was meant to pull out the sulphurous bite of strong storage onions. Today's cured yellow onions are milder; one change of water, or none at all, is enough unless the onions are genuinely fierce.
- An hour is far too longA whole medium onion is tender in 20 to 30 minutes of simmering. The hour specified here, and the two hours for old onions, suggests large, tough bulbs that had been in store since the previous season. Test with a skewer rather than the clock.
- Pressing out the waterThe colander-and-saucer trick works and is worth keeping. Boiled onions hold a surprising amount of water and will flood the serving dish and dilute the butter if it is not driven off. Press gently or the layers slide apart.
- The milk finishAdding a pint of milk to the boiling water for the last half hour gives something in the direction of creamed onions, though no sauce is made here. It will curdle if the pot is at a hard boil, so drop the heat to a bare simmer once the milk goes in.
- FryingParboiling three times before frying gives soft, sweet onions with no browning to speak of. If you want colour and caramelisation, skip the boiling entirely and take sliced onions slowly in butter or dripping for 30 to 40 minutes.
- Beef drippingsRendered beef fat, saved from a roast. Any neutral fat works, though the flavour is noticeably duller; bacon fat is closer in character.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Reckon one medium onion per person as a side dish, two if they are small boiling onions.
Boiled onions appear often in Victorian and Edwardian American cookery, less as a delicacy than as one of the few vegetables that kept reliably from harvest through late winter alongside potatoes, turnips and cabbage. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same body of household material that produced the widely reprinted Buckeye books, treats them accordingly: no herbs, no sauce beyond butter and pepper, and an assumption that the reader's onions may well be tough and pungent by the time they reach the pot. The insistence on repeated changes of water is a period signature; it appears in cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic and reflects what was then widely believed — that onions were hard on the digestion, as well as the plain fact that a long-stored onion tastes much sharper than a fresh one. The milk variation is often said to lie behind the creamed onions that still appear at American holiday dinners.