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French Fried Onions
Use good-sized onions. Peel and cut in crosswise slices one-fourth inch thick. Dust with salt, dip in a slightly beaten egg mixed with one-half cup cold water, then in fine dry crumbs and fry as directed for French Fried Potatoes.
A cross-referenced recipe: the batter is here, the frying instructions are somewhere else in the book. Here is what the missing half amounted to, plus the details that decide whether the coating stays on.
- Deep-fat temperature"Fry as directed for French Fried Potatoes" points to a deep kettle of hot fat; the potato recipe is not reproduced here, but books of this kind usually judged the fat by a cube of bread browning in about a minute, which corresponds to somewhere around 350-375F. For crumbed onions the lower end of that range is safer; hotter and the crumbs darken before the onion softens.
- FatLard or a solid vegetable shortening would have been the likely fat, though the recipe does not say. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is a fairly substantial slice, in the same range as modern onion rings; thinner slices tend to collapse and shed the coating. Push the slices apart into separate rings after cutting, or the layers steam instead of frying.
- The egg washOne egg to half a cup of cold water is a thin wash, not a batter; the crumbs, not the egg, provide the crust. The recipe gives no quantity of onions, so scale the wash by eye.
- Crumbs"Fine dry crumbs" means oven-dried bread crumbs sieved fine, closer to modern plain breadcrumbs than to panko. Let the coated rings stand on a rack ten minutes before frying so the crumbs set.
- SaltingThe salt goes on the raw onion, before the egg, which is the right order — salt on the finished crust falls off. A second light dusting after draining is still worth doing.
- DrainingLift onto a rack or crumpled paper, not a plate; steam trapped underneath softens the crust within a minute. Serve immediately, or hold uncovered in a 250F oven for no more than fifteen minutes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two or three large onions make a reasonable side dish or garnish for four.
Crumbed and deep-fried onions belong to the same American enthusiasm for the deep kettle that produced French fried potatoes, croquettes and fried oysters -- a technique books of this period treated as one procedure applied to many foods, which is why the instruction here is a cross-reference rather than a full method. The origin of the "French" in French fried is unsettled: it is often linked to "frenching," meaning to cut into uniform pieces, but this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one, and a reference to French cooking method cannot be ruled out. Onions were cheap, storable through winter and widely available, so a recipe like this one is less about the vegetable than about dressing up something ordinary with egg, crumbs and hot fat.