We Promise, This is Delicious - Simple, Roasted Onions From 1808

This episode is so very, very simple. It's an 1808 recipe for roasted onions. Come along with us as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century. This recipe is from a very, very popular cookbook from the early 19th century. It's the New System of Domestic Cookery by Rundell. It shows up in a lot of different places. And it's interesting because here in the early 19th century we can start to see a shift in cooking. And the idea that something as simple as this shows up into a cookbook, you know, usually those 18th century cookbooks are a bit more fancy cooking. This is simple home cooking. Let me read to you this recipe. It's so very, very simple. Roast onions should be done with all their skins on. They eat well alone with salt only and cold butter or with roast potatoes and with beetroots or with beetroots. So again, they're just, the directions are almost, there aren't any really. She doesn't tell you what temperature to bake them. So we're gonna take the idea of baked potatoes and say, what happens if we wanna bake an onion? That's what we're basically gonna do here. Some of these recipes from the similar time period talking about doing it in a Dutch oven. We're just gonna do it in a standard oven today. You could do it in an earthen oven. That'd be really good. We're just gonna be using a standard, largish, medium, yellow onion because she doesn't tell us exactly which kind of onion we should use. She's probably thinking, you're gonna use whatever onion you have available to you. No, for real. This is all we're gonna do. She said, make sure to bake these with the skins on so don't peel them. We don't cut them. We just roast them. We just bake them. I mean, we could do it in a Dutch oven, but we're just gonna take these just like they are, put them in our oven. And again, same kind of temperature and time as you would a baked potato in the same size. So maybe 30 minutes or 40 minutes at 350, you know, whatever you would do with a baked potato of a similar size. So let's just put these in the oven. There are our onions. They've cooked up and they've cooled down just enough so that they're not too hot to handle. Again, these cooked 35 minutes, 40 minutes. And I believe that what we'll do here is to extract them from their shell. I just wanna cut the very bottom. If I can get it to cut, it's so soft. Just cut the very bottom off. Here we go. And now we can just squeeze it right out of its shell and into our serving dish. And just take that right out there. And there is our onion all ready. And we can now cut this, add a little bit of salt. So let me cut this. Frankly, this may have been the easiest recipe that we've ever done on this channel, but I'm very interested to see just how it turns out. You know, I enjoy baked potatoes and I enjoy onions, and I couldn't imagine a dish that was just this simple, especially showing up in a cookbook from almost the 18th century. It's the early 19th century. So let's find out here. She says that you could eat it just with salt, and that's the only thing. Let me tell you, these are really, really good all by themselves. Usually we have something, you know, onions like this maybe with a pot roast that might bring in a bunch of other flavors, but this is just the onion by itself. And with butter and salt, it's amazingly good. Truly, I can imagine if you weren't well-to-do, if you didn't, if your larder wasn't full, if you didn't have any meat available to you, you could have a very good meal on just onions roasted. Amazing. If you're interested in other historical recipes, especially that emphasize the onions, make sure to check out this wonderful Spanish recipe with fish and onions.