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Boiled Onions, Cream Sauce
Carefully peel twenty-four small white onions, plunge in two quarts boiling water with a table spoon salt and boil for fifty minutes. Drain on a sieve, place in a small frying pan with a cream sauce, boil for five minutes, then dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward creamed vegetable side from the era when boiled onions were standard on an American holiday table. The only real problem is the timing.
- Fifty minutes is far too longSmall white boiling onions, an inch to an inch and a half across, are tender in 15 to 20 minutes of simmering. At fifty minutes they collapse into layers and turn watery. Test with a skewer at 15 minutes and pull them the moment the centre yields.
- Peeling without tears or frayingDrop the onions into boiling water for about 30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Trim the root end but leave the base plate intact so the layers hold together in the pot.
- The cream sauce is assumedThe book expects you to know it: a white sauce of roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or half milk and half cream, cooked out for a few minutes and seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Nothing in the original suggests a quantity, so make enough to coat, not to swim.
- Drain them properlyWet onions thin the sauce to nothing. After the sieve, let them stand a minute or two and shake off any water trapped between the layers before they meet the sauce.
- Five minutes in the panThis step marries the sauce and warms the onions through rather than cooking them further. The original says to boil, but a bare simmer is safer for the onions; move the pan rather than stirring, which breaks them apart.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in two quarts of water is a light seasoning bath, not a brine. Season the sauce separately and taste before serving.
- YieldTwenty-four small onions serve six to eight as a side dish. A "vegetable dish" is simply the serving dish for a vegetable course; period examples were both open and covered. Send it out hot and eat it promptly, as the sauce skins over.
Boiled onions under a white sauce were one of the fixed points of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century table in Britain and America, appearing on Christmas menus — and, in America, Thanksgiving menus — with a regularity that now seems strange for so plain a dish. Their virtue was practical: small white onions kept well in a cellar through the winter, so they were reliably available when the season offered little else, and a flour-thickened white sauce turned them into something that could sit beside a roast without apology. The sauce itself is generally traced to the béchamel of French practice, absorbed into English-language cookbooks through the nineteenth century and commonly just called "cream sauce" or "white sauce" by the time this book was written; the recipe calls for finishing the vegetable in the pan with its sauce, rather than pouring the sauce over at the table.