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Glazed Onions
Carefully peel twenty-four very small, white, sound onions, all of about the same size if possible. Place them in a lightly buttered saucepan, all at the bottom of the pan. Pour in one gill cold water, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, half teaspoon powdered sugar and half ounce butter. Cover the onions with a sheet of buttered paper. Place the pan on a brisk fire and boil for five minutes; then place the pan in the hot oven until the water is completely evaporated. Add two tablespoons of half glaze. Heat for three minutes and serve.
A classic French glazed onion in a single pan: brief boil, then dry-down in the oven until the sugar and butter lacquer the outsides. The only fussy element is the finish, which the original assumes you have on hand.
- Half glaze"Half glaze" is demi-glace — espagnole and brown veal or beef stock reduced together until syrupy. Two tablespoons of a good reduced stock, or a jarred demi-glace loosened with water, does the same job. Without it the onions are still good, just less glossy and less savoury.
- Gill and saltspoonOne gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is a scant half teaspoon — assertive, and worth scaling back if your pepper is freshly ground.
- Hot oven"Hot" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400–425F, though the recipe itself gives no figure. The pan goes in uncovered enough for steam to escape; you want the liquid gone, not the onions stewed.
- The onionsTwenty-four very small white onions means pearl onions or small cipollini, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 inches. Frozen peeled pearl onions work and save considerable time; thaw and pat dry first, and cut the initial boil to two or three minutes.
- Trim, don't gougePeel and trim the root end flat but shallow — cut into the root plate and the onion falls apart in the pan. A shallow cross-nick in the root keeps the centre from pushing out.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a round of parchment, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the onions. It holds in just enough steam to cook them through while letting the surface begin to glaze. Foil traps too much moisture.
- Watch the last minutesOnce the water is gone the sugar goes from glaze to scorch quickly. Check at 15 minutes, shake the pan to roll the onions in the syrup, and pull them when they are amber and tender to a skewer.
- YieldTwenty-four onions serves six as a garnish alongside roast beef, braised meat or poultry. They reheat gently in their own glaze.
Glazed onions are a fixture of nineteenth-century French garnish work, appearing under names like oignons glacés and turning up as a component in dishes such as boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin rather than as a stand-alone vegetable. The technique — a little sugar, a little butter, liquid cooked away to a coating — is the same one applied to glazed carrots and turnips, and the reliance on demi-glace here arguably marks the recipe as belonging to the professional kitchen tradition, which The International Cook Book (Alexander Filippini, 1906) may be read as bringing to American households. Filippini spent years at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe assumes a pot of brown stock reduction is simply there.