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Stuffed Onions
(Germany.) Parboil 6 large onions. Drain them, cut out the centres, and chop them with a cup of bread-crumbs, 6 mushrooms, 2 tablespoonfuls of sausage meat, 4 tablespoonfuls of capers, and 1 of gherkin pickles, minced parsley, salt, and pepper. Mix with 1/2 cup of stewed tomatoes, fill closely, and bake 20 minutes. Serve with a good white sauce.
CABBAGE (as cooked in Provence.).
Remove the outer leaves from 2 fine heads of cabbage, slice them, and parboil in salted water. Drain them, add salt, pepper, 2 ounces butter, parsley, thyme, a bayleaf, a clove, and garlic or chopped onion, and 1 pint of white stock. Cook for 1 hour, strain the stock and reduce it to half, pour over the cabbage, on thin slices of toast.
BAKED CABBAGE (as cooked in Normandy and Flanders.). Take off the outer leaves of a large head of cabbage. Scoop out the heart,--having first parboiled the cabbage,--stuff it with bread-crumbs or boiled rice, mixed with some bacon, cold minced mutton or veal or fish, herbs, onions, yolks of 2 eggs, and seasoning. Tie neatly, boil in stock or hot water 1 hour, strain the stock, and pour over, or make a good sauce; serve with potato croquettes.
ARTICHOKES (as cooked in Lyons.).
Trim 6 large artichokes, cut into quarters, and parboil 10 minutes in salted water. Drain, put them with 2 ounces butter, and fry them, add juice of a lemon, salt, pepper, a glass of white wine, and 1/2 cup of stock. When tender, arrange on toast, and pour sauce over all.
RICE (as cooked in Andalusia, Spain.).
Warm 1/2 pint of olive oil or butter, add 1/2 pound boiled rice, 1 1/2 pounds of chicken, cut into dice, onion, parsley, a pinch of saffron, and seasoning. In Spain, garlic is used, but it is not necessary. Cook 45 minutes, stir well, and arrange on a dish. Brown with a salamander, and squeeze a lemon over it before serving.
RICE. (A convent recipe from the Carmelites.) Wash and drain 1/2 pound of rice, cook it with plenty of salted water until tender. Drain again, let it dry, add 1/2 ounce of butter, a pinch of mixed herbs, salt, pepper, and the meat of a dried haddock which has been soaked, dried, and flaked. Mix and pour in a dish, cover with the whites of 3 boiled eggs, also the yolks, chopped fine, 1/2 cup of stock,--made from fish-bones,--and plenty of grated cheese. Bake 1/2 hour and serve, garnished with parsley.
The page runs six recipes together under one heading; the stuffed onions are the title dish and the rest are separate regional preparations that share a paragraph. None of them give an oven temperature, and several use measures that no longer read plainly.
- Oven heatAssume a moderate oven, 350-375F, for the stuffed onions and for the Carmelite rice. Neither recipe states a temperature.
- The sausage meat is the hingeTwo tablespoons of raw sausage go into the onion stuffing, and 20 minutes at 375F may not carry the centre of a tightly packed onion to 160F. Either brown the sausage before mixing it in, or bake until the filling itself registers 160F, which will take closer to 35-40 minutes.
- Parboiling the onions"Parboil" here means 10-15 minutes in salted water for large onions, until a skewer meets some resistance. Cool them before hollowing or the layers slide apart; cut a cone out of the top rather than digging from the side.
- SalamanderIn 1900 this was a heated iron disc held over a dish to glaze the top. A broiler for two or three minutes does the same job for the Andalusian rice.
- A glass of wineA wineglass in recipes of this period is roughly 1/4 cup, though "a glass" for the Lyonnaise artichokes is ambiguous; 1/3 to 1/2 cup of dry white is sensible with 1/2 cup of stock.
- Half a pint of olive oilThat is a full cup for half a pound of rice in the Spanish dish, which reflects an older Andalusian hand with oil. A third of a cup gives the same effect without pooling.
- Dried haddockThe Carmelite recipe means salt or hard-smoked haddock, not the modern lightly smoked fillet. Soak salt fish several hours, changing the water, then poach and flake; if using ordinary smoked haddock, skip the soaking and reduce added salt.
- YieldSix stuffed onions serve three to six depending on whether they are a course or a side. The Andalusian rice, with a pound and a half of chicken, feeds four as a main dish.
- White sauce"A good white sauce" means a béchamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 1/2 cups milk, simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a small genre of turn-of-the-century American books that collected foreign dishes and labelled them by country or province — Germany, Provence, Normandy and Flanders, Lyons, Andalusia — for cooks who were unlikely ever to eat them abroad. The attributions are best read as flavour rather than provenance: stuffed onions with capers and gherkins are plausibly German in spirit, but the parboil-hollow-stuff-bake method was hardly peculiar to Germany, turning up wherever a kitchen needed to stretch a little sausage or cold mutton across a vegetable. The Carmelite rice is the most telling entry on the page. A meatless dish built on dried haddock, hard-boiled eggs and cheese is exactly what a convent kitchen produced for fast days, and dried salt fish was the standard Lenten protein across Catholic Europe for centuries before refrigeration.