Fried Onions
Peel and slice; fry in hot butter or pork gravy; season with pepper and salt. When tender, pour into a vegetable dish and serve, or pour over a broiled beefsteak and serve very hot.
A four-line recipe that assumes a cook already knows what fried onions should look like. The only real variables are heat, fat and patience.
- QuantityNo amount is given. Three or four medium yellow onions, sliced, cook down to enough for four servings or to top two steaks.
- Pork gravyHere this means the rendered fat and browned drippings left in the pan after frying salt pork or bacon, not a thickened sauce. Bacon fat is the closest modern equivalent; butter alone will brown fast, so a mix of butter and a neutral oil is steadier.
- "Hot" fat, then lowerStart medium-high to get colour on the edges, then drop to medium-low. Onions held over high heat scorch at the tips while the centres stay raw, which is the usual failure of this dish.
- How long "tender" takesSliced onions need 20 to 30 minutes over moderate heat to go genuinely soft and sweet. Five minutes gives you hot raw onion.
- Slice thicknessCut about a quarter inch. Thinner slices collapse into a jam, which is fine for a steak topping but poor as the "vegetable dish" the recipe also offers.
- Seasoning orderSalt early if you want them to sweat and soften, late if you want browning. The recipe directs seasoning while the onions are frying, before they are tender, so it does not settle the question either way.
- Serving over steakSpoon the onions and a little of the pan fat over the meat immediately. Held on the plate they cool fast and turn greasy.
Fried onions in a book of this vintage sit somewhere between a vegetable and a condiment, which is why the instruction ends with two entirely different destinations: a vegetable dish, or the top of a broiled steak. Onions were among the cheapest and longest-keeping vegetables in an American household, stored in the cellar through winter and available when almost nothing green was, so they turn up constantly in late nineteenth and early twentieth century cookery. The direction to fry in "pork gravy" reflects a kitchen in which salt pork was rendered often and its fat kept for cooking; butter is offered first here, but pork fat was the cheaper option. Steak with onions was a common enough dish on American eating-house and hotel bills of fare of the period.