Marion Harland's Complete Cook Book: A Practical and Exhaustive Manual of Cookery and Housekeeping

oven for a quarter of an hour. Uncover, and cook for five minutes longer. Serve in the dish in which they were cooked. ONIONS A once-despised vegetable which now takes rank as a highly-respectable edible upon good men’s—and women’s—tables. Delicate spinsters no longer faint at fumes of boiled onions, and finical housewives have forgotten the rusty joke about cooking onions in the middle of a ten-acre lot. There are ways of extracting the coarser flavor that once condemned them with dyspeptics. Cooks have learned that there is as much difference between a well-done and a parboiled onion as between half-cooked and mealy potatoes. Housewives and physicians now appreciate the nutritive values of the esculent bulb, and prize it for these as well as for the seasoning which nothing else supplies. Onion juice is indispensable to the flavor of ragouts and soups, and is obtained by grating, not chopping. The superiority of this mode of getting the essence of the vegetable can not be rightly estimated by one who has not tried it. Onion seasoning should be tasted, never seen. Stewed young onions Cut off the stalks, remove the skins and lay the onions in cold water for half an hour. Put them over the fire in hot, salted water and cook for twenty minutes. Drain off the water and return the onions to the fire with a cupful of hot milk, in which has been dissolved a bit of soda the size of a pea. Add a tablespoonful of flour and stew slowly until the sauce is like thick cream. Boiled onions Peel and lay for an hour in cold water. Boil in two waters until tender. Drain, sprinkle with pepper and salt; put into a deep vegetable-dish and pour over them a great spoonful of melted butter. Baked onions (No. 1) Peel the onions and boil for ten minutes. Drain, arrange in a greased pudding-dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and pour over all a white sauce, to which a beaten egg has been added. Sprinkle with fine crumbs, set in the oven and bake, covered, for twenty minutes,