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September 9
Menu: Soft Shell Crabs on Toast; Broiled Steak; Creamed Potatoes *Stuffed Onions; Oyster Plant Salad; Mint and Pineapple Sherbet; Jumbles Coffee Stuffed Onions-Boil 8 large onions in boiling salted water till tender. Drain, and with sharp knife cut centers from each. Mix together in a basin 2 tablespoons chopped cooked ham, 3 tablespoons crumbs, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 2 tablespoons cream, 1 beaten egg, salt, pepper, and paprika to taste, and 1 tablespoon chopped parsley. Fill with this mixture, sprinkle each with crumbs and dot with Crisco. Place on baking dish and bake in moderate oven 1 hour. Spanish onions are best to use.
A straightforward stuffed-onion recipe from the Crisco calendar, though an hour in the oven is longer than most cooks would give an onion that has already been boiled tender. A few notes on quantities and technique.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as around 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. The onions are already cooked through, so the hour of baking is mainly setting the egg-bound filling and browning the crumbs; 30 to 40 minutes may be enough, and longer risks the shells collapsing.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, and still sold. Butter works in the filling and for dotting the tops, and gives better flavor and browning. The recipe exists to sell the shortening, not because it is the better fat here.
- Spanish onionsThe recipe is right about this. Large, mild, thick-layered onions hold their shape after boiling. Small yellow onions are more likely to fall apart when hollowed.
- Hollowing them outCut a slice off the top and scoop from there, leaving two or three outer layers as a wall. Trim the root end flat but do not cut through it or the filling leaks. Chop the removed centers and add them to the stuffing rather than discarding.
- CrumbsDry breadcrumbs, not the soft fresh kind, unless you increase them. Three tablespoons is a modest amount for eight onions; expect to need more, since the filling should be stiff enough to mound.
- Filling quantityTwo tablespoons of ham across eight large onions is very little. The proportions read as a garnish rather than a stuffing, and the ham and crumbs may need doubling or tripling to fill eight Spanish onions properly.
- YieldEight onions, one per person as a side dish, or two each as a light supper course with bread.
Stuffed onions belong to a long line of hollowed-vegetable dishes that let a small amount of meat stretch across a table, and versions using cooked ham appear in American household cookery of the period. This particular version comes from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookery for Crisco, introduced in 1911, in which shortening is written into the recipes whether or not it improves the dish. The "Calendar of Dinners" format, assigning a menu to each date of the year, was used in period cookbooks and manufacturer booklets: it relieved the housekeeper of daily planning and, incidentally, ensured that the product appeared in the kitchen throughout the year. The dating of this entry to September falls around the beginning of the storage-onion season.