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August 11
Menu: Fried Chicken, a la Maryland; French Fried Potatoes *Stewed Onions; Stuffed Tomato Salad; Musk Melon with Ice Cream Coffee Stewed Onions-Peel onions and boil in boiling salted water till tender. When done, drain, and turn into hot vegetable dish. Melt 2 tablespoons of Crisco in saucepan, then stir in 1 tablespoon flour, mix well, add 1 cup milk and stir till boiling, add salt and pepper to taste and pour over onions.
A plain white sauce poured over boiled onions, printed as one item in an August dinner menu. The original assumes you know how many onions to cook and how long they take, so the quantities need filling in.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives no onion count. One cup of sauce will dress roughly a pound to a pound and a half of small onions, or six to eight medium ones quartered, and serves four as a side.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold and still works here, but any neutral fat does the same job. Two tablespoons of butter gives a better-tasting sauce; the book is a Procter & Gamble promotion and calls for Crisco throughout.
- Choice of onionSmall boiling onions or peeled shallots hold their shape best. Large yellow onions will collapse into strands unless you quarter them through the root end.
- Boiling timeUnstated in the original. Small whole onions need 20-30 minutes at a gentle boil, quartered large ones 12-15. Test with a skewer at the centre; underdone onions are sharp and rubbery.
- Drain them properlyThe hinge of the dish. Onions hold a surprising amount of water, and any that clings will thin the sauce into milk. Drain well, then let them steam dry in the colander for a minute before they go into the dish.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons fat, one tablespoon flour and a cup of milk is a thin white sauce by modern proportions. Cook the flour in the fat for a minute before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw paste. Add the milk gradually and whisk.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg is the conventional finish for onions in white sauce. Season the sauce after it thickens, since reduction concentrates the salt.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had launched the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier and needed to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that was neither butter nor lard. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a full menu for every day of the year, which is why this side dish carries the header of the August 12 dessert course rather than its own name. Onions in white sauce were standard nineteenth-century boarding-house and family cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, and the recipe would have been entirely familiar to readers; its only novelty is the fat in the roux, which is exactly the point the book was making.