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Baked Spanish Onions
Peel three medium, sound Spanish onions, clip off a small piece at both ends, cut in two crosswise, and arrange in a baking dish cut side up. Mix in a bowl an ounce butter, a half bean finely chopped garlic, teaspoon chopped parsley, a saltspoon each salt and pepper and the juice of half a sound lemon. Spread this butter evenly over the six half onions, cover with a buttered paper and set in oven for thirty-five minutes, being careful to baste quite frequently. Bring dish to oven door and lift up paper, sprinkle over two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, baste well, reset in oven for ten minutes more, remove and serve in same dish.
A straightforward braise-roast that needs two things the original leaves out: an oven temperature and enough liquid in the dish to baste with.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only "set in oven." A moderate oven, somewhere around 350-375F, is a reasonable modern reading. Total time is forty-five minutes, thirty-five under paper plus ten with crumbs.
- "Half a bean" of garlicA clove; older cookery books sometimes call a garlic clove a bean, possibly echoing the French gousse, meaning a pod. Half a clove for three onions is very restrained; a full clove is closer to modern taste and will not overwhelm the lemon.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons, creamed with the garlic, parsley, seasoning and lemon juice into a compound butter that is spread over the cut faces.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. A single saltspoon of pepper across six onion halves is a light seasoning by present standards.
- Basting needs liquidTwo tablespoons of butter and a little lemon juice will not survive frequent basting for thirty-five minutes. Put a few tablespoons of water or stock in the bottom of the dish so there is something to spoon back over the onions before they scorch.
- The buttered paperButtered parchment laid directly on the onions, not sealed foil. It keeps the cut faces from drying while still letting steam escape, and it comes off cleanly for the crumb stage.
- Spanish onionsLarge, mild, pale-skinned onions; a modern Spanish onion is the nearest equivalent. Halved crosswise, they should sit flat and stable.
- Crumbs at the endFresh crumbs, not dried, added only for the last ten minutes so they brown rather than burn. Baste them once with the pan butter so they colour evenly.
- YieldSix halves — three portions as a vegetable dish, six alongside a roast.
Baked whole or halved onions were a standing item in British and American vegetable cookery long before this book, valued because a large mild onion turns sweet and almost custardy under slow dry heat with nothing more than butter to help it. What marks this version out is the finish: garlic, parsley, lemon juice and a crumb gratin. The name is doing double duty: it names a type of mild large onion, generally traced to imports from Spain and the Canaries into Britain in the nineteenth century, so a dish can be "Spanish" here by way of the vegetable rather than the seasoning. The buttered paper laid over the dish is the older ancestor of the foil-and-parchment cover, useful in kitchens where an oven's heat was uneven and the top of a dish dried out long before the middle cooked.