Spanish Onions
Spanish onion is one of the most wholesome vegetables that can be used. Stuffed and roasted, they make a fine dinner dish. To prepare them in this way, select large onions, or of about the same size, peel them and cut a slice off from the top. With a vegetable or fruit scoop, remove the inside of the onion, leaving "shell" a half an inch thick. Put a portion of the inside of the onion into a bowl, adding some parsley, a little sweet pepper, salt, a slice of stale bread and some sausage meat. Chop up fine and pour in enough water to make the mixture stick together. Stuff the onion shells with this and put them into a pan containing a little water. Place a small lump of butter on top of each onion; put into a hot oven and bake until tender. Serve with a roast joint.
A straightforward stuffed vegetable, but the original gives no temperature, no time and no quantities. A few decisions have to be made before it goes in the oven.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" in a book of this vintage means roughly 425-450F. Onions this size want longer and gentler heat than that; 375-400F is closer to the mark, and a foil cover for the first half prevents the exposed rims from scorching before the centres soften.
- TimingLarge Spanish onions need 60 to 90 minutes to become genuinely tender. Test by sliding a thin knife through the side wall, not by the colour of the top.
- Sausage meatBulk sausage meat, sold loose or squeezed from casings, not cured or smoked sausage. Since it goes in raw, the stuffing should reach 160F on an instant-read thermometer, which usually happens well before the onion shell is soft.
- "A little sweet pepper"Ambiguous in the original: it may mean chopped sweet bell pepper or sweet paprika. Either reads sensibly here. A tablespoon or two of finely chopped bell pepper is the safer interpretation given that everything else in the list is chopped together.
- Stale breadA slice of dry, close-crumbed bread torn small acts as the binder. Modern soft sandwich bread turns to paste; dry it in a low oven first, or use coarse dried breadcrumbs and a little more water.
- Water in the stuffingAdd it sparingly, a spoonful at a time. The onion and sausage both release liquid as they cook, and a wet mixture will slump out of the shells.
- Water in the panKeep it to about a quarter inch and top it up if it dries. It steams the base of the onions and stops the sugars in the pan juices from burning.
- YieldOne large stuffed onion per person as a side to a roast; two make a light main course. The scooped-out centres will give more filling than the shells hold, so any surplus can be baked alongside in the same pan.
Spanish onions - the large, mild, pale-skinned type - were widely sold and named as a distinct kind of onion in English and American markets by the later nineteenth century, and cookery writers of the period often described them as sweeter and easier to digest than common yellow onions, which appears to be the claim behind this recipe's opening line about wholesomeness. Stuffing and roasting a hollowed vegetable is much older than the book, and the same technique was applied to marrows, peppers and tomatoes in Victorian and Edwardian household manuals: a shell, a forcemeat of bread and sausage bound with liquid, a lump of butter on top. The closing instruction to "serve with a roast joint" places the dish as an accompaniment to roast meat.