Baked Onions
Baked onions are rather unusual, although a most palatable dish. Use only the large white onions. Parboil them in water, then turn off the water and cook ten minutes in milk. Set the onions close together in the baking dish in which you will send them to the table. Thicken the milk left in the saucepan with a lump of butter rolled in flour and seasoned to taste. Pour over the onions until the dish is full. Sprinkle salted and peppered cracker crumbs over the top and bake covered, for fifteen minutes. Then remove the cover and brown.
A creamed onion gratin written in the shorthand of 1900, when a cook was assumed to know how long to parboil an onion and how hot to set the oven. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, is right for this: hot enough to brown crumbs under the final uncovered stage without splitting the milk sauce.
- The onions"Large white onions" most likely means full-size mild globes rather than the small silverskins usually used for creamed onions. A large Spanish onion (or a modern sweet variety such as Vidalia) peeled and left whole, with the root end trimmed flat so it sits upright, is the closest match.
- ParboilingWhole onions of that size need 15-20 minutes at a simmer before they are tender enough to finish in the oven, and a slit cut in the root end helps them cook evenly. Undercook them at this stage and no amount of baking will save the centres.
- Cooking in milkMilk scorches fast and boils over faster. Keep it at a bare simmer with the pan partly off the burner, and use enough to come at least halfway up the onions so the ten minutes actually does something.
- "A lump of butter rolled in flour"The period equivalent of beurre manié: butter and flour worked together, or simply a lump of butter coated in flour, stirred into the hot milk off the boil. Reckon on about a tablespoon each of butter and flour for every cup of milk left in the pan; the sauce should coat a spoon, not set.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from unsweetened soda or common crackers. Crushed saltines are the direct descendant; panko is drier and browns harder. Toss the crumbs with a little melted butter or they will bake pale and dusty.
- The two-stage bakeFifteen minutes covered sets the sauce and heats the dish through; the uncovered finish is purely for colour and takes another 10-15 minutes, or a minute or two under the broiler. Watch it, as cracker crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- YieldOne large onion per person is generous as a side dish. The recipe calls for the onions to be set close together in the dish they are served from, so a dish that holds them in a single close layer gives the best ratio of crust to sauce.
Creamed onions in one form or another were fixed in the American repertoire by the late nineteenth century, usually made with small boiled silverskins in a white sauce and served alongside roast poultry; this version scales the idea up to whole large onions and gives it a browned crumb top, which puts it in the family of gratins that American cookbooks of the period tended to call simply "scalloped." The buttered cracker crumb topping is a distinctly American habit, the soda cracker standing in for the breadcrumbs a European kitchen would have used.