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Baked Stuffed Onions
Select large onions as near of a size as possible; peel them, cover with boiling salted water and simmer for ten minutes. Drain, scoop out the center of each onion and fill the cavity with cold minced meat of any kind, highly seasoned and moistened with beaten egg and a very little melted butter. Place the onions closely together in a baking pan, baste with a little butter and bake in a moderate oven until tender and browned, basting occasionally with butter. Prepare separately one-half of a cupful of nice brown sauce, add the scooped out centers after chopping very fine, season highly and pour around the onion before serving.
A sound way to use up cold roast game or poultry, and it needs little translation. The points below cover the oven, the parboiling, and the sauce.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven is conventionally read as about 350F. Large onions will likely need somewhere in the region of 45 minutes to an hour; they are done when a knife slides through the wall without resistance.
- Choose the right onionLarge yellow or Spanish onions, 3 to 3.5 inches across and matched in size so they cook evenly. Trim the root end flat so they sit upright, and leave the base intact so the filling stays in.
- The ten-minute simmerThis is the hinge. Parboiling only softens the onion enough to hollow it without splitting; it is not meant to cook it through. Drain well and let the onions cool a few minutes or they will scald your fingers and the shells will collapse when scooped.
- ScoopingA melon baller or a grapefruit spoon works better than a knife. Leave two or three outer layers as the wall, and keep the removed centers -- they go into the sauce.
- "Cold minced meat of any kind"The phrase is deliberately open, and any cold roast will do; leftover venison, rabbit, duck or pheasant suit it well, chopped fine rather than ground to paste. Since the meat is already cooked, the filling mainly needs heating through; season it hard, as onion and the surrounding butter mute it.
- Egg and butterOne beaten egg binds enough filling for four to six onions. "A very little melted butter" is a tablespoon or two -- more and the filling weeps out during baking.
- Basting and the panSet the onions close together in a small dish so they support each other, as the recipe directs, and baste with melted butter two or three times. A couple of tablespoons of stock or water in the pan will help keep the bottoms from scorching, though the original calls only for butter.
- Brown sauceHalf a cup means a small quantity of thickened brown gravy -- a roux-based espagnole or simply pan drippings thickened with a little flour and stock. Add the finely chopped onion centers and simmer until soft before pouring around, not over, the onions.
- YieldOne onion per person as a light main course with bread, or half an onion as a side. The recipe scales to whatever the roast left behind.
Stuffed onions belong to the wide family of "made dishes" -- recipes whose purpose was to bring yesterday's roast back to the table in a form that did not look like leftovers. Game came into the house in whole birds and joints, was carved for a first meal, and the remainder was minced, seasoned sharply and re-baked in something that would carry it. The onion is doing the work a pastry case, a scooped tomato or a ramekin does elsewhere. The technique is old and widespread -- parboil, hollow, fill, bake -- and versions appear in English and French household cookery well before 1900, often with veal or mutton forcemeat; here the meat is left open to "any kind." The instruction to chop the scooped-out centers into the sauce is characteristic of the period's thrift, which treated a discarded onion core as a small waste worth correcting.