Home › A Calendar of Dinners › May 20
May 20
Menu: Cream of Pea Soup; Stuffed Eggs, Tartare Sauce; Croutons; Baked Bananas; Potato Fluff; Onions Stuffed with Nuts; Apple Salad; Coffee Onions Stuffed with Nuts-2 large Spanish onions, or 6 good-sized Bermuda onions, 1 cup boiled rice, 1 cup chopped English walnut meats, mixed with 1 teaspoon salt, 1 saltspoon pepper, and 1 raw egg. sauce. Put onions, without peeling into a saucepan of boiling water; add half the salt and boil for 1/2 an hour. Drain and dry. Remove outside skin, and with handle of a teaspoon, take out center, saving it for the Mix nuts, rice, seasoning and egg; fill this into onions; stand them in baking pan, brush with melted Crisco and bake in moderate oven for 1/2 hour. Chop very fine the portion that you have taken from center, press it through a sieve, add this pulp to a cup of tartare sauce and pour it into a sauceboat. Serve onions on platter; pass the sauce.
A vegetarian main from Crisco's dinner calendar, built on the sound principle of parboiling onions whole before hollowing and stuffing them. A few of its measures and terms need translating.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour is enough to set the egg-bound filling and colour the tops; the onions are already tender from boiling.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. The teaspoon of salt is split: half goes into the boiling water, half into the filling.
- The onionsSpanish onions are the large pale globes sold as such today; Bermudas were a flatter, milder sweet onion, now largely replaced by Vidalia, Walla Walla or similar. The recipe offers two large Spanish onions or six good-sized Bermudas as equivalents, and states no yield.
- Boil in the skinThe onions go into the boiling water unpeeled; the outside skin comes off only after draining and drying. Let them cool enough to handle before you dig out the centres.
- HollowingUse the handle of a teaspoon as directed, or a small melon baller, and leave a wall of two or three outer layers so the onions hold their shape. Save every scrap of the centre for the sauce.
- CriscoThe book's reason for existing. Any neutral fat works for brushing; melted butter gives better browning if you are not keeping the dish dairy-free.
- The sauceThe onion centres are chopped, sieved to a pulp and stirred into a cup of tartare sauce, served cold alongside hot onions. A food processor does the chopping, but still push the pulp through a sieve or the sauce turns stringy.
- Raw egg in the fillingThe egg is a binder and is fully cooked in the oven. Check that the centre of the stuffing is hot and set before serving.
Stuffed onions of this kind belong to the wave of "meatless" dinners that American cookbooks pushed hard in the 1910s, when nuts and rice were among the familiar substitutes promoted as protein stand-ins for households economising or observing Lent. The Story of Crisco, first published in 1913, was issued by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a hydrogenated cottonseed oil shortening that behaved like lard but was neither animal fat nor butter. That made it useful for exactly this sort of dish, which was often built to be kosher, Lenten or simply cheap. The calendar-of-dinners format, assigning a recipe to a date, was a common device for selling a pantry staple by making it part of a year's routine rather than an occasional purchase.