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Boiled Onions in White Sauce
Peel the onions and cut off the roots, dropping into cold water as fast as they are peeled. Drain from the cold water and put in a stewpan with boiling water to cover generously. Add 1/4 teaspoon of salt for each quart of water. Boil rapidly for 10 minutes, with the cover partly off the saucepan. Drain off water and cover onions with hot sweet milk (a quart of onions will require a pint of milk). Simmer for half an hour. Beat together 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 level tablespoon of flour. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 teaspoon of white pepper. 1 quart okra 1 cup rice
A straightforward creamed onion dish, but the method depends on two things the text assumes you know: the milk must never reach a real boil, and the flour-and-butter paste is stirred in at the very end to thicken the milk the onions cooked in.
- The stray line"1 quart okra 1 cup rice" at the end does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be stranded text from an adjacent one. Ignore it.
- QuantitiesThe recipe scales by volume: a quart of peeled onions to a pint of milk. A quart of small boiling or pearl onions runs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb.
- Sweet milk"Sweet milk" means ordinary fresh whole milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or soured milk that older recipes often call for. No sugar is involved.
- Keep it below a boilMilk simmered hard will scorch on the pan bottom and taste of it, and rapid boiling breaks the sauce. Hold it at a bare tremble and stir up from the base now and then. A heavy pan helps.
- Thirty minutes is longHalf an hour in milk after ten minutes of boiling will leave small onions very soft. Test at 15 minutes and stop when a knife slips through with no resistance; the milk is meant to take on onion flavor, which happens well before the onions disintegrate.
- The butter and flourBeaten together raw, this is beurre manié; whisk it into the hot milk in small pieces at the end and let it cook two or three minutes to lose the raw-flour taste. One tablespoon each will thicken a pint of milk only lightly, which is the intent.
- Season by tasteA full teaspoon of white pepper is aggressive by current palates, and a second teaspoon of salt on top of the salted cooking water can push the dish over. Add half, taste, adjust.
- Peeling into cold waterThis is not fussiness. Cut onion surfaces discolor and the water also blunts the sulfur compounds that sting the eyes. Drain them well or you will dilute the cooking water.
Creamed onions of exactly this kind were a fixture of American vegetable cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and they survive most visibly as a Thanksgiving side dish in the Northeast. The two-stage method here — boil hard in salted water, discard that water, then finish in milk — was standard advice for strong vegetables: the first boiling was believed to carry off the sharpness, and leaving the cover partly off was general period advice for strong-smelling vegetables, though the recipe itself gives no reason. Community and corporate cookbooks like this one leaned heavily on such plain white-sauce vegetables, since flour, butter and milk were reliably on hand and the technique could be reused across cauliflower, celery, potatoes and peas.