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Stewed Onions
(Cipolle in stufato) or Keep in cold water, for half an hour, two pounds of middle-sized onions. Afterward skin and place in a saucepan in which pour as much broth as is necessary to cover them. Let them cook on a low fire for an hour, if they are scallions, or young onions. If they are not, two hours are not enough, sometimes.
When cooked and soft, drain and place in a large deep dish. Brown a piece of butter with a tablespoonful of flour, a cup of broth, salt and pepper. Mix everything and when it begins to boil pour the sauce on the onions, which must be served hot. 161
A simple braise that lives or dies on cooking the onions all the way through. The instruction that matters is the one buried in the middle: the timing is elastic, and firm storage onions need far longer than the hour that suits young ones.
- Cook to collapse, not to the clockTest with a skewer rather than a timer. Firm storage onions may want two hours or longer at a bare simmer before they are soft to the centre; the recipe itself warns that two hours are sometimes not enough. Young onions or fresh bulbs should be done in about an hour.
- "Scallions" hereThe heading is simply Cipolle in stufato, and the Italian behind "scallions" is not given, but what appears to be meant is small fresh onions rather than the slim green scallions of a modern supermarket. Cipollini or small boiling onions are a reasonable substitute for two pounds.
- The cold-water soakNo reason is given in the text. A soak of this kind is usually said to loosen the papery skins and take the harshest edge off raw onion; little of either will matter after a long simmer, so skip it if you are pressed.
- "A cup of broth"The book was published for American households, so a cup is most likely the ordinary 8 fl oz measure. Use the onion cooking liquid rather than fresh broth -- it is already sweet and seasoned.
- "A piece of butter"Unspecified, as often in Italian books of the period. For a tablespoon of flour, 1 to 1½ tablespoons of butter gives a proper roux. Cook the flour in the butter until it smells nutty and turns pale gold before the broth goes in, or the sauce will taste raw.
- Keep the onions wholePeel by trimming the root end only just enough to hold the layers together. Drain them gently and lift with a spider; onions cooked to this point fall apart if tipped into a colander.
- Broth strengthA homemade meat or chicken broth was assumed. Modern commercial stock is much saltier, so hold back on the salt in the sauce until the end.
- YieldTwo pounds of onions serves four to six as a vegetable course alongside a roast.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking, and reads as a condensed English rendering of the domestic Italian manuals of the previous generation; a debt to Pellegrino Artusi is often suggested, though the borrowing is not acknowledged in the book itself. Cipolle in stufato belongs to the plain contorno tradition -- a vegetable simmered in broth and bound with a butter-and-flour sauce, meant to sit beside the roast rather than compete with it. Butter and a flour thickening of this kind were more at home in the northern Italian kitchen than the southern. The loose timings in the original are honest rather than careless: the age and size of the onions, not the clock, decided how long they took to go soft.