Baked Vidalia Onions

The lilac at the back corner of the house began its bud-swell this week — the small tight purple knots tightening visibly day by day, a process that always seems to take place mostly at night because the change between dawn and dusk is small and the change between dusk and the next dawn is greater, the lilac doing its real work in the dark the way most spring work happens. The lilac has been at the back corner since 1923 when my grandmother planted it, and it is now, at a hundred and two years old, a thicket more than a single shrub, with woody trunks the diameter of my wrist and a height of about twelve feet, and it produces in the second week of May every year a quantity of fragrant purple bloom that is so excessive it borders on the indecent. I cut a great armful for the kitchen every May. The rest I leave for the bees and the wind.

Made a lemon roast chicken Sunday — Helen's technique, with the lemon halves stuffed in the cavity, the herbs under the skin, the bird trussed and butter-rubbed and roasted at four hundred for an hour and twenty. The chicken came out with a skin like brittle gold and the smell of citrus and herbs filling the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. I ate it with rice and the early dandelion greens I had picked from the lawn that morning and dressed with bacon fat and vinegar — a Vermont spring tradition that I had nearly forgotten about until the dandelions came up thick this year and reminded me. The dandelion green eaten in late April is a sharp bitter green that does the early-spring work of cleaning the winter out of the body, or so my grandmother used to say, with the medical authority of a woman who had outlived three doctors and who treated the lawn as a pharmacy.

Tuesday I drove to Lakeview Cemetery in Burlington to put fresh flowers at Helen's grave for the first time this season. I do not put flowers there often — once or twice a year, usually around her birthday and around our anniversary — and the flowers I bring are always the ones from the garden when the season permits, the daffodils being the first that the garden offers and the ones I brought this week. I clipped a small bunch from the bed by the front porch on Monday evening, wrapped the stems in damp paper towel, drove to the cemetery in the morning, and laid them at the base of the headstone. I did not stay long. I stood for about ten minutes. I thought about her without putting the thought into words. The day was overcast and quiet and the cemetery was empty and the flowers looked the way they were supposed to look on the grave, which is to say like a small bright fact placed against the gray stone, the kind of fact that says: someone was here. I was here. I will be here again.

The chicken that Sunday — Helen’s recipe, with the lemon and the herbs and the butter-rubbed skin — wanted something alongside it that was quiet and unhurried, something that cooked slowly and sweetened with the heat the way the season itself sweetens slowly. Baked Vidalia onions are that dish: they ask almost nothing of you, they fill the kitchen with a smell that is gentle rather than assertive, and they come out of the oven tasting like something that has been coaxed rather than forced — which felt right for a Sunday that was already asking me to be patient with small, living things.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 1 hour | Total Time: 1 hour 10 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 medium Vidalia onions, peeled
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pats
4 teaspoons beef bouillon granules (or 4 bouillon cubes, crumbled)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Aluminum foil, for wrapping

Instructions

Preheat the oven. Heat your oven to 400°F (200°C). Tear four large squares of aluminum foil, each large enough to fully wrap one onion.
Prepare the onions. Slice a thin layer from the root end of each onion so it sits flat. Cut a deep X into the top of each onion, slicing about two-thirds of the way down through the center without cutting all the way through.
Season generously. Gently open the cuts of each onion and nestle 1 tablespoon of butter into the center. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of bouillon granules over the top, add a pinch of black pepper, and drizzle 1 teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce into the opening.
Wrap and seal. Place each seasoned onion in the center of a foil square. Bring the edges of the foil up and crimp them tightly together at the top to form a sealed packet, leaving a small dome of space above the onion so steam can circulate.
Bake until tender. Set the foil packets on a baking sheet or directly on the oven rack and bake for 55 to 60 minutes, until the onions are completely tender when pierced through the foil with a skewer or knife tip. The inner layers should be soft and the natural sugars deeply caramelized.
Serve immediately. Carefully open the foil packets — steam will escape — and transfer each onion to a shallow bowl or plate. Spoon any accumulated juices from the foil over the top and serve alongside roast chicken, rice, or whatever the evening calls for.

Nutrition (per serving)

Baked Vidalia Onions — A Side Dish as Patient and Rooted as the Garden Itself