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Onions-Fried
Peel and slice and fry in lard or butter; season with pepper and salt, and serve hot.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know what fried onions should look like. The details worth adding are heat, fat and time.
- Quantity and yieldThe original gives no amount. Two large yellow onions, about 1 lb, will cook down to a cup or two depending on how far you take the browning, enough for three or four as a side or a topping for steak.
- Lard or butterThe recipe offers either. Lard was cheap and common in nineteenth-century kitchens and takes the heat better than butter, which browns and burns at the edges of a long fry. If using butter, either clarify it or start with half oil.
- Slice thicknessQuarter-inch rings or half-moons hold together well; thinner slices cook much faster and need closer watching if they are not to catch. Slice with the grain, pole to pole, if you want the pieces to keep their shape.
- The hinge: heat and patienceOnions release a great deal of water before they brown. Medium heat, a wide pan and half an hour or more of occasional stirring gives sweet, deep-brown onions; high heat gives scorched edges over raw centres.
- Crowding the panA heaped pan steams rather than fries. Use a 10- or 12-inch skillet for two onions, or cook in two batches.
- Salt timingThe recipe seasons at the end. Salting early instead draws out moisture and speeds the softening stage; season again to taste once the onions have coloured.
- ServingThe recipe says only to serve hot; fried onions were a common accompaniment to beefsteak, liver, or chops. They also hold a day or two refrigerated and reheat well in a dry pan.
Fried onions turn up in many English-language household manuals of the nineteenth century, often in exactly this compressed form, because the technique was assumed rather than taught. Onions kept well through the winter in a cellar or barrel, they were cheap in every market, and they carried the flavour of a plain meat dinner when little else was available. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by local women and sold to raise funds for the Hospital for Sick Children, and its brevity here is characteristic of that kind of book: contributors wrote down what they did, not what a beginner would need. Such mixing of instruction with commentary and household opinion on the same page is typical of the community cookbook.