No. 2766

Onions, White or Bermuda—Stuffed

Oignons Blancs Ordinaires ou d'Espagne Farcis

Take either common white onions or Bermudas of medium size, each weighing about three ounces; plunge those selected into boiling water for two minutes, then drain and peel off the outer skin; empty the insides with a vegetable spoon (Fig. 91), blanch for a few moments, drain and stuff them with chicken forcemeat (No. 79), incorporating as much cooked fine herbs (No. 385); bestrew the tops with bread-crumbs, pour butter over and lay them in a sautoir lined with fat pork; moisten to a third of their height with broth (No. 194a), then cook until they attain a color in a moderate oven; dress on a half-glaze sauce (No. 413) and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Ranhofer entry written for a professional kitchen: four of its components are cross-references to other numbers in the book. Assembled with modern equivalents it is a straightforward braised stuffed onion.

The hinge: hollow, don't splitThe two-minute plunge in boiling water loosens the outer skin so it slips off without tearing the layers beneath. Take out the centre with a melon baller (Ranhofer's "vegetable spoon"), leaving two or three intact layers as a wall, or the shell collapses in the braise.
Onion sizeThree ounces is a small onion, roughly two inches across — smaller than most supermarket yellow onions and closer to a large cipollini or a small sweet onion. Figure two to three per person, so eight to twelve onions for four as a side dish.
Chicken forcemeat (No. 79)Ranhofer's No. 79 is a chicken farce of the classic type: pounded chicken with a panada, seasoning and cream. A food processor does it in a minute, kept very cold. Any fine chicken mousseline or a well-seasoned ground chicken mixture works; it must reach 165F in the centre, so check the largest onion.
Cooked fine herbs (No. 385)Ranhofer's fines herbes is not raw chopped herbs but a cooked mixture: shallot and mushroom sweated in butter with parsley, moistened and reduced dry. Make a couple of tablespoons and fold it into the forcemeat.
Sautoir and fat porkA sautoir is a shallow straight-sided pan; any wide ovenproof skillet or braiser will do. "Lined with fat pork" means thin slices of fatback or unsmoked salt pork laid on the bottom to keep the onions from scorching and to enrich the braising liquid — blanched bacon is one workable substitute.
Oven and liquidTake a moderate oven as roughly 350–375F. Broth to a third of their height; the instruction to cook "until they attain a color" implies the pan is left uncovered so the crumbed tops brown while the bases braise. Reckon on 45 minutes to an hour for onions this size, adding a little more broth if the pan threatens to run dry.
Half-glaze sauce (No. 413)Demi-glace — reduced brown stock, either made from scratch or bought as a concentrate and let down with water. The onions are dressed on a pool of it, not sauced over the crumbed tops.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, where he was chef across more than thirty years, though not continuously, and its structure explains the shorthand here: the book is a numbered system in which a garnish, a forcemeat and a sauce are each written once and referred to thereafter, so a single vegetable entry assumes the reader has a kitchen turning out stock and demi-glace daily. "Bermudas" were the mild flat onions shipped to the eastern United States from Bermuda, and later grown in Texas under the same name he sussweet onion of the period, prized precisely because they could be eaten in quantity without harshness. Stuffed onions of this type belong to the wider French tradition of hollowing a vegetable to carry a forcemeat, the same logic as stuffed tomatoes, cucumbers or braised lettuce, and the entry itself is filed among the vegetable dishes.